


Home Is Where the Scourge Is

by touchstoneaf



Series: Souls In Bondage [3]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Comics 1998), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Adult Language, Angst, Claiming Bites, Don't copy to another site, Established Relationship, F/F, F/M, Fluff, Humor, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Violence, and Giles to stop being an ass, no beta we die like men, time to start putting the Scoobies back together, using Giant Dawn to tell Joss to stop Slut-Shaming dammit!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:01:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 25
Words: 251,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23782822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/touchstoneaf/pseuds/touchstoneaf
Summary: Part 3 of"Souls In Bondage"seriesAfter nearly five months spent in a Hell that was strangely like Heaven, Buffy and Spike have come back to the real world.  And guess what?  There’s a reason why Hell was so much fun.  For one thing, there weren’t old friends and ex-Watchers there, and the ur-Slayer didn’t have to figure out what to tell her baby Slayers about the whole, ‘in a lifelong, committed relationship with a vampire’ sitch.  Also, you know, now there was giant Dawn to deal with, and figuring out where to set up housekeeping if everything went to… well, hell.Also, you know, there was that whole business with the Scourge.  Couldn’t drop the ball on that.Note:This is a sequel to “LA Is the Hell You Make It”, and isPart 3 of a series.If you haven’t read the rest, you’ll have no idea what the bloody hell is going on.  I mean, you can; I can’t stop you.  But a lot of what’s happening in here will be taking place in a world unrecognizable to the uninitiated.
Relationships: Angel & Buffy Summers, Spike & Dawn Summers, Spike/Buffy Summers, Willow Rosenberg & Buffy Summers, Xander Harris & Spike
Series: Souls In Bondage [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1422868
Comments: 96
Kudos: 116





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pfeifferpack](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pfeifferpack/gifts).



> Part 3 of **"Souls In Bondage"** series, sequel to “LA Is the Hell You Make It”.
> 
>  **Notes on timeline:** For those of you who have made a stab at reading BtVS's so-called "Season 8”… I'm ignoring a lot of that timeline (partially because I haven't read them, lol, I did a lot of looking at the wiki). Mostly because it irritates me that they used the word "season" for something that appeared to cover a year and a half to two years or so of ground, and because the continuity doesn't work; it simply didn't make sense when you lined it up with things like Angel's season 5 (really, only the first few of the issues actually coincided directly with AtS' final season, or the Twilight thing would be happening at the same time as that show ended, and everyone would know about the existence of vampires. Oh, and Harmony would have her own TV show, not just be Angel's secretary. So, bah). 
> 
> Suffice it to say, all mistakes are mine, and mostly I don't care. Also, some stretches are wildly deliberate (like, I made Dawn's time at Berkeley start with Summer Session, because I wanted her to be a 'giant' early... mostly to address some really irritating trends in the Whedonverse using Spike as feminist spokesman extraordinaire and personal mouthpiece.) And I don't apologize.
> 
> Around the time of this story, the Scoobies are barely gathering in enough slayerettes to start up the new center in Scotland, Giles has just gotten off the ground in Russia, Andrew is back and forth between there and Italy, Faith, Willow, and Kennedy are still MIA most of the time, and when the US military is starting to seriously worry about the Slayer Organization, but hasn't exactly hooked up with "Twilight" yet, since AtS has only just ended. 
> 
> **Formatting Note:** For anyone who’s brave enough to enter this saga in the middle (run away now and come back after reading Part One! Ahem. I mean, do you, I’m glad you’re here!) I do a weird thing. Or, at least, it’s weird nowadays. I use an old fanfic convention from long ago because I'm ancient, and we didn't used to have access to italics in the days when I used to fic. Can't break the habit now, I'm just too old and it looks weird for me without it. Character thoughts look like this in my stories: /Blah blah blah./
> 
>  **Disclaimer:** All characters property of Joss Whedon, damn his brilliant, confusing soul. And Mutant Enemy. And apparently some people at, I guess, Fox, now? (Who can even keep track anymore. I’m still half-stuck in the WB/CW/UPN confusion.) All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners, yadda and blah. The OCs are MINE, ALL MINE! I am in no way associated with Joss, Mutant Enemy, UPN, Fox, or any other media franchise. I intend no infringement. I intend sexy shenanigans and JUSTICE FOR SPUFFY!
> 
>  **Pairing(s):** Um, Spuffy. Always Spuffy; ESTABLISHED RELATIONSHIP GOODNESS AHOY. Other than Spuffy, acknowledges all canon pairings up to the end of S7 of BtVS and S5 of AtS and then takes a header right off into the land of canon-divergence, because that’s where I live. 
> 
> **Rating:** Oh, this is so very NC-17. If it’s Spuffy and it’s not, I’m really not sure what you’re doing with your life. I mean… Mature, kinky goodness. Blood-playing, claimy fun. (Spuffy ain’t shy.)
> 
>  **Special Thanks (as always) To:** OffYourBird, for having rescued me from the wilds of the internet to bring me to my new online home at Elysian Fields.
> 
>  **Author’s Note / Dedication:** Pfeifferpack, you get this one, for "discovering me" at the start of the series, and for being such a staunch cheerleader from beginning to... well, hopefully not an end, anytime soon... And for being practically my brain-twin, more often than not, in our meta-discussions, I swear. Damn, though; can't say how grateful I am you're the "straw" I drew for my first validation.  
> Seriously. Thank you. You're awesome and wonderful and I'm sad that RL doesn't let me send you hugs. I hope you're holding up okay as life keeps smackin' us all around. But you're a gem.
> 
> PREFACE:  
> Wow. Going over the characters and notes and all for this one... This is, like, tame compared to the last one! Much tighter an ensemble, much more focused on just a few members of the family, a lot less awful stuff happens. It's... cozy. Hehe. Not that these two don't deserve cozy after all that insanity in Hell-A, but jeez. I'm amazed at me, LOL. I don't think there's even any torture. Hell, I don't even think there's a whole hell of a lot of angst. At least, until we go tell Giles to suck it. But, ya know. Meh.
> 
> Off we go, then?

_"And it really was a kitten, after all."  
_

* * *

Angel stood across from them as the curtains of rain slowly petered out, shoulders heaving and dark hair dripping as he clung—sobbing, Buffy thought—to the resurrected Connor. Well, not resurrected, she supposed, since he had never actually died? 

God, this was so weird. This was no mummy-hand-catch-test time-loop. Gris was alive, still, out there somewhere. And Groo. /Oh my God, Groo./ And Maria. Betta George. And Lorne! And… God; probably Non and Burge and all the other assholes who’d styled themselves as demon lords. And…

Spike squeezed her free hand, hard, once, then let it reluctantly go. “Gotta check on Illyria, pet.” His voice seemed… oddly upset. But she couldn’t tell what he was upset about, per se, wasn’t getting her standard read of him. He must be just concerned about how Illyria was handling… 

Well, being shrunk and de-godified, if that was a word. And he _had_ promised Wesley’s ghost he’d take care of her. “Oh! Yeah, of course!” Man, that had to be weird; to be this phenomenally-powerful being with endless abilities… and then to suddenly be crammed back into the human shell.

Wait. Was it a rotten human shell, since Fred’s body had been dying without Illyria inside it, or was it back to being what it was before they… 

Oh, wow, this was all so confusing.

“I have to get Gunn to… I dunno. Wolfram and Hart, I guess, since probably the hospital’s gonna be crazy.” Angel’s voice was still cracked with relief and tears as he informed his son of the plan. “Take the dragon… He’s bleeding too much, and there might still be vamps around. The smell will draw them by the dozens if there are…”

“Okay, yeah, you… should do that.” Connor so didn’t sound ready to help. In fact, he sounded more than a little truculent about the whole thing. Not that Buffy could blame him, since Gunn had been the guy who’d literally just killed him, who’d tried to kill his father in front of him a little bit before that, and who’d killed his girlfriend into the bargain. She kind of doubted there would be any love lost there for a while, even though, if everything was back to what it was and Gunn was here bleeding out behind the Hyperion, that meant that he was probably not a vampire anymore. That he was back to being the really great guy he seemed to have been before he was sired. 

For one thing, Connor didn’t exactly have the years of experience Buffy had had with forgiving people for what their demons had done. /You’ll get it, kid. It takes a few times around the track before you pick it up./ Though, hopefully he wouldn’t have to go through that with his own father… and how the hell was Connor even _here_ with them, if time had turned back to when they had first fell through into Hell-A? Had the kid been on his way here to this battle right when everything had gone to pot? Found out somehow that his father was about to go down in a blaze of glory and shown up just as they were really starting to cut a swath through the demon army? Or had he just remembered where his father had said they’d been when this all began, and headed over immediately when he found himself back in this dimension? 

She supposed that was possible, at this time of night. Everything was about fifteen minutes away if you really broke the speed limits, depending on where he was, and it wasn’t like the cops would be out in force right now when everyone had just now gotten back and would all be reeling from their deaths or near-deaths or tortures or…

Would everyone remember? /Or is it just us?/

/Is this really happening?/

It felt so weird to be back. Like she was watching everything on a movie screen, several steps removed from it all. She felt… bizarre, actually. Not like herself at all. Like she was out of phase, somehow, with this reality; like part of her was somewhere over to her right and further away than it should be, and bizarrely distant from her physical body. Weirdly removed from her tactile experience in a way that made her feel almost… consistently anxious and tense. 

And, more and more concerning… she could _swear_ she couldn’t feel Spike. 

He was right _there;_ just a few paces to her left, talking with Illyria. She could hear the murmurs of their conversation, though it seemed to take place from some great distance, yet it was almost as if he was miles away from her. In another county or something, for all she could get any physical sense of him. It made her uneasy as hell. Made her feel cold, uncertain. 

Wrong.

Was she in shock? Or was she just suffering some kind of stupid mental jet-lag from reentry? Because yeah, Hell-A had become home in a way that nothing had been since Sunnydale, and in a really idiotic way she was kind of sad to see it go. Which she knew it should probably be worrying to her, but this meant she—they—had to face, well, _everything_ now, which wasn’t with the fun. But she could swear that her feeling of displacement had to have more to do with something internal than just her hovering concerns, way in the future of now, with things like how people she hadn’t seen in months would deal with her evolved relationship with Spike. Because they were just going to _have_ to deal, either way. She and Spike weren’t going anywhere, and she wasn’t going to change a single ounce of how they worked for anyone else’s comfort. 

/And when it comes to our bond and the biting, the baby Slayers will just have to…/

It hit her with the weight of a semi-truck. Nearly took her to her knees, made her drop her axe for a moment; and her hands fled to her neck in tandem. Felt only old scars on the right side… and smooth, unmarred skin on the left. No accompanying jolt of sensual heat, no spurt of need, no… /Oh God, no, no, no…/

Time had turned back. Back to when they had last been in this alley. Before she and Spike had ever shared a bond, and she had been bound to an entirely other vampire.

One she could feel, now, if distantly, like an odd echo from the past, to her right, as he lifted Gunn’s bleeding body in his arms. Easily, because he was a vamp again. “I’ve got you, Charles…”

“Just let me die, Angel. Everything I did…”

“Not gonna do that, Gunn.” But even as he spoke, Angel’s dark gaze rose to meet hers, knowing.   
  
And expectant. 

/ _No_./

She jerked her eyes away, feeling almost frantic as she sought Spike’s. Felt his indigo gaze meet hers even as he continued his calming chat with the former demigod. Read the lines of his body; tight. Anxious. Uncertain and full of an obscure pain she could now, finally read. “You’re sure you’ll be alright, though?” But as he asked, his eyes spoke to Buffy. Acknowledging. Knowing. And she read the emotion there. The frustration. And, buried beneath it, the fear; a sick agony leaching through.

Oh god, did he think she wouldn’t want…

“It is what must be,” Illyria was saying quietly. “I am the reason Wes is dead. I took away his reason for living.” She looked up, toward what looked to be a dripping fire escape above them, lost in the darkness. “I will fetch his body, and bring it to whatever place is acceptable in this time for human bodies to be interred.”

“It sounds like Angel’s taking Gunn to get checked out. If he can’t get fixed up at lawyerville they’ll run him to the hospital. Can take it there. It’s usually the place bodies end up.” Spike’s voice was cautiously even, but by the thread of carefully-leashed tension underneath it was clear that he was about to fly apart if he didn’t get away soon; that he felt torn between two necessities. 

“Very well. I will go with Angel, then.” And without another word, the leather-clad creature leaped upward, to the accompaniment of a sharp, metallic _clink_ as she caught the ladder to the fire escape and swarmed up to retrieve the apparently-restored-to-juicy-recently-deceased-status body of Wesley Wyndham-Price.

Spike didn’t wait for her to descend. Made the break clean as he turned to stalk back to Buffy, wearing an expression she hadn’t seen since Sunnydale. This was a Spike steeled to hear rejection, ready to be thrust into the heart of anguish, and really? / _Really_ , Spike? After all we’ve been through, you _actually_ think…/

She couldn’t get out of here fast enough, with him; especially since she could swear she could still feel Angel’s eyes on her, telegraphing that sick, hungry expectation that she would turn away from Spike and come back to him like some kind of lovesick child, and just, what the actual fuck? _Why?_ Why, after all she’d seen with him and Cordy, just now? Did he think she’d actually been, what? Put aside, totally missed their whole convo? Or did he somehow think that any of that was her, just because she’d been involved? 

What _even?_

But then she remembered Spike’s words from the Hyperion almost a month ago. _“Because he thinks the only reason you let me bond you was because you weren’t under his bleedin’ influence, innit? That if you could’ve felt him then, you’d’ve never done it. Because he’s the bloody be-all, end-all, and you’d never want to let him go to let the likes of me have you, would you? Not if you were in your right mind.”_

No. This really wasn’t happening; especially not after what she had just experienced, and certainly not after the life she had just lived, and she grabbed up her weapon. Kicked herself into motion, moved to meet Spike halfway. Caught the wet collar of his black t-shirt before he could say a single word and stared intensely into his eyes. “Please, let’s get out of here. I don’t care where. In the hotel. Wherever. And let’s fix this, before I have to feel him for even one second longer.”

The look in Spike’s eyes was something she would never forget. He stared at her, pale hair dripping into his face. Not breathing, but his entire body—his entire being—suddenly expanded as if her words had inflated him like a balloon. And then without another word he had her hand and they were moving, fast, around the building toward the nearest entrance. They passed Angel, still carrying a bleeding, lolling Gunn, swift and mindless in their need to reverse the damage the time-loop had done to the one thing most dear. And Buffy knew Angel knew, by the way the unasked-for bond with him rippled with something that felt like pique as they went by. That she had chosen yet again. 

She didn’t care about his shocked sensibilities, his betrayed vampire amazement, so sharply shoved back into relations with his demon and feeling her again. She didn't give a damn how it felt from his perspective; whether it felt uninterrupted for him, because he had never officially sensed her as 'belonging' to Spike, so it wasn't 'real' to him in that 'vampire' way. And she didn't want to give him time to wrap his demonic head around it yet again; didn't feel like she should have to be the patient, loving one. Not in this instance.   
  
She cared about nothing but getting inside and getting this done. Now. Yesterday. Failing that, she’d do it against the alley wall, but she honestly really didn’t want to experience such an intimate act with Angel’s bitter eyes on her. 

She wanted as far from that morose, possessive gaze as she could get right now.

The side-door was locked. Spike kicked it open before she could do it, because sometimes he was damn faster than she was, and because in this dimension he had just had human blood that day, right? At Wolfram and Hart, to bulk up before the fight? She could barely remember right now, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was getting inside and getting his mouth on her before another second…

“Hey! Don’t wreck my building, Spike!”

They both ignored Angel’s shout to shove inside, Spike tugging hard at her hand to bring her in after him; because that didn’t matter either. The state of the building, property rights, laws; none of it. None of it mattered but her desperation and his. Their shared imperative, and her urgent need to shed that weight in the back of her mind; the one that dragged her toward guilt and self-loathing and fear and all those things that were a part of another life and another Buffy. And because she couldn’t live one second longer with that pulling drag toward the vampire behind her, and not the one in front of her. /Damn, _damn_ it!/ she thought as she followed her white-haired beacon through the dark hall with her hand tightly clutching his, / _You’re_ my future, _not_ him./ 

They broke through past the small side-corridor and into the area behind the office and counter. In the welcoming, dry gloom Buffy threw down her miraculously-restored axe and promptly pushed Spike up against the wall opposite the hall, near the entry. “Please. Now. Fast.” She was tearing at her stupid leather jacket collar; got the wet thing off somehow and dropped it to the floor with a slithery, flopping sound. Yanked aside the dumb, sloppy, incredibly wet neck of the red blouse she had thought long-since consigned to oblivion. At least it was loose and easy to pull down; even if it was a disaster wet, and even if they were both covered with goo and blood and unmentionables right now. 

None of it mattered, and she shoved her hair out of the way where it stuck to her neck, yanked at the stupid ponytail while he stared at her, eyes sparkling oddly in the gloom. “Spike!”

His fingers rose, touched her just under her ear, and in spite of herself, in spite of her desperate hurry, she shuddered to the light caress. “Oh God,” she whispered as he ran the pads of his cool digits slowly down, along the vein, bringing it up. Trembled, bucking a little, because even if her body didn’t remember in this iteration, her brain for god’s sake did. But. “We can do it that way next time,” she breathed. “I don’t wanna wait. I can’t stand it. Can’t stand feeling _him_. Can’t stand _not_ feeling you. Please; I don’t care if it hurts a little…” She found his still-blue eyes with hers in the dark, wondering why the hell he was making her beg, why he was just standing there in his human features with his fingers making her breathless and doing fucking _nothing_. “It’s not like I haven’t felt it without the full festival. And I’m always ready for you. We can do it right next time…”

He pressed lightly at virgin flesh with two fingers… and then drew away. “No,” he whispered.

_“What?”_ she demanded, shocked to her core. _“Why?”_

He shook his head, lips quirking in that sardonic amusement that said she’d read him wrong… and moved a little closer. And his voice changed to that more measured tone he used so rarely, lost his usual, clipped meter. His accent lengthened, colored with awe and adoration. “Buffy, Love, I will most definitely have you again, and never be more grateful that you’re choosing me. Once more; free and clear. But.” His fingers rose, stroked again, making her tremble. And if his voice remained soft, there was a core of steel there that wouldn’t bend. “I won’t do it fast. And I won’t do it wrong.”

A spark of pure rage lit in her. “Spike, dammit; we have plenty of time for sex. You’re not the one _feeling_ him! I _need_ this…”

“Feel him all the time, Buffy,” he reminded her grimly, and the sardonic amusement touched his eyes now, brought the rough London back to his voice. “He’s family, yeah?”

/Oh. Right. Now that he’s…/

“But…” Hands stuttering as they moved over damp flesh, slipped down her arms to catch her fingers, and he tugged her close, eyes now pleading on hers. “If we do it wrong this first time, then it won’t work the same as it used to.” Cool fingers squeezed hers; a quiet, sincere admonition. “Every time I touch you there, it’ll be like the other ones.” Something injured slid into his eyes, something she could only see from here, this close, in the dark, but could not feel. It was so disturbing not to _feel_ him! “Your body’ll remember pain, not pleasure,” he went on; inexorable and loving, damn him. “And it won’t matter if I do it right again, later; a dozen times, a hundred times. What your nerves get down on paper will be the first one. That’ll be what sticks.” He lowered his forehead to hers, breathing slowly and unnecessarily as if in an attempt to slow _her_ breathing in turn. “Please, Love. Let me take the time.”

She trembled harder, the tattoo of desperation beating in the back of her mind. The feel of Angel behind her; getting ever more distant and now somewhere above; but still there, the awareness of him on the horizon of her being. She had never realized before the bond with Spike how _present_ it was; all the time, just _there_. So much a part of her that she had never been able to recall a time when it hadn’t been. It had taken feeling a truly real, consistently-reinforced bond with a _lover_ to know what it was _supposed_ to feel like; but now that she knew, she could also recognize the other for what it had always been. An unwanted leash, tugging at her mind, her soul, her being. Like a tiny thrall, and, /Oh God, did I let Dracula thrall me and take me just because I subconsciously wanted to be free?/

Spike had never tried to thrall her with anything but the sheer, astonishing pleasure he could bring to her body when he took her blood. God knew she had seen the difference. Had felt it with Dracula, had heard it in the soothing, hypnotic way Spike spoke to his donors, the way it rocked them. She knew he _could_ do it to her. That she would go under for him in a heartbeat, bond or no, with how susceptible she was now to his voice, his eyes, his touch. He could do it right now. But he wouldn’t. 

And he wouldn’t bite her in this moment unless her body was playing along. Wouldn’t sacrifice their future pleasures to speed this one moment. Which… God knew she wouldn’t want to lose that either; the wonder and the shocking pleasure of having a random erogenous zone there, where he could touch it any time and make her ready with the barest brush of fingers or lips, the slightest breath. But. “I don’t know if I can relax enough, with him there, listening in…” It was helping that her ex was becoming more distant, on his way to whatever hospital, but he was still there. Just… sitting in on her mind, in her blood, _damn_ him!

“You always did before,” her lover reminded her quietly, and that was so true that it stilled all her fears. So many times she had come _this_ close to answering Spike’s silent, unspoken plea to let him bite her during their first ill-fated affair. Come so near the edge of that gap, flirting in her mind with the edges of darkness, with the idea of fully surrendering to all that he offered. But it had been the one thing she could say in all righteousness she had never willingly done with her ‘unsouled monster’, when she had given him license to offer her every other possible painful pleasure; allowed him free range of her body, and then some. He had done things to her she had never even considered with anyone else, and made her scream with it—hell, she had _teased_ him, bitten _him_ , all _over_ —but this one supposed perversion she had never allowed.

And now, god. She would take that back in a heartbeat if she could. It would have rendered all this moot. And what would it have changed between them, then? /So much, probably./ 

Spike had always wanted to do all of it right for her. Had always begged her to let him take it slow, and make it good. Let him love her. And she had always wanted fast, and rough, and painful… and done. Functional intimacy, goal-oriented and swift. /And that just isn’t who we are anymore./ 

She let out a breath, though it shook. Loosed her hands from his to loop them around his neck. “Take me away from him,” she whispered. “Make me remember.”

She felt him quake, then, in her embrace. And was unsurprised when he came to her mouth first; a clashing, fierce, possessive kiss that said all it needed to about all that he had been holding in check till now. His arms came as fiercely around her waist, punching into the small of her back to bring her hard against his belt buckle, his insistent erection. And she couldn’t breathe with needing to climb into him, and she didn’t care. Oxygen didn’t matter. None of it mattered but this. 

And then somehow they had turned, and she was against the wall, him kneeling. And somehow, magically, he had gotten her jeans not only open, but down a little, despite the fact that they were so wet from the rain that she might as well have jumped off the nearest pier, or fallen into the hotel fountain on their way in; and he had her equally-wet underwear shoved aside and his tongue on her before she could catch her breath, and god, there was nothing here to hold onto. Nothing on the wall, no furniture close by to lean on, and she scrabbled with her nails against the old wainscoting, caught his wet curls in her right hand, startled as she did by the feel of leftover gel there, because she hadn’t felt that sensation between her fingers in… years. Clung hard despite, and fumbled with her left for the nearby doorframe. Held on for dear life. Held on and just tried to feel. To stay inside her body, and ignore the sensation in the back of her mind that was _not_ Spike, that was… 

/Going to be gone soon. He’ll be gone soon. It doesn’t matter, ignore it, just _feel_ , just feel, oh God, _that_ … Just be here with Spike, he’s all that matters, especially when he’s…/ Especially because her jeans held her legs mostly closed, and Spike was way too good to let something like that stop him, but the pressure of it was torture, and she was already shaking against him. And he was, as always, thoroughly aware of every cadence of her body. Was up before she could come, relentless fingers taking the place of his mouth, and mouth against her neck; on _his_ side, /Oh please, yes/. Fingers impossibly demanding; and he was growling now, his breath cooling rain and sweat against the heat of her skin so that she knew he had vamped, and _god_ , she needed him. Now, before it was too late; _now_ , because she could still feel… /No./ It needed to stop, he needed to fix it. “Please, please…” she chanted, from somewhere far away; and his fingers were making her jerk spasmodically in time with every thrust against her… And his mouth was just _there_ , hovering, teasing until she bucked, hard into his hand. And she couldn’t stop anymore, and it was going to be too late, why was he _waiting?_ Everything in her was tightening up…

It wasn’t until she locked up tight, her hands clamping down on his shoulders, and she wasn’t breathing anymore, that his fangs sliced in. And she screamed when, at that very last instant, his fingers slid back and just managed to find her opening, and pressed, and pressed in time with the pull of his mouth, because it was not enough, and too much, and he was growling his claim. And for her part she had no idea what she was saying to him anymore except maybe, “Yes,” and “Yours,” and definitely, “Thank you thank you thank you…” 

She was still shuddering against him when she came back to earth some time later, to the sensation first of the thorough, gentle, healing sweeps of his tongue, and the sound of him… _purring_. Jolted with it as she slowly remembered how to breathe. And she was pretty sure that those breaths were more sobs than anything. And…

She couldn’t help it. She burst into tears. She felt like a complete idiot, but, “I can feel you. I can feel you again.” Could sense his unbelievable gratitude, his vibrant, out-of-control urge to come into her, now; right here. And, stronger even than his need, the pulsing core of his love for her; like a living thing inside of her, raging in her blood. It was a thing she could never deny, or question, or fear would leave while they had this…because she could _feel_ it. 

She pulled away from him, found his eyes with hers. His chest was heaving, game face still on. He had a touch of blood just at the corner of his mouth, and his eyes on her were incredibly intense; the eyes of a wild, wide-awake and primitive creature who had reclaimed his mate and would never let her go again.

/Don’t./ She reached out, caressing his cheek; his feral brows. In gratitude. In absolute relief. And saw the wildness fade a little, the wonder come back to the amber eyes. “I can feel you again,” she whispered. 

The vibrancy of him in her mind, thrumming in her blood, was like life. And the other bond—the heavy, dragging weight of it?—that was gone, like it had never been. “Thank you.”

The game face fled, and blue eyes blinked at her for a moment in wonder. Then, “Christ, Buffy…” he whispered, and lowered his face to her shoulder. His mouth opened, and he bit her lightly, bluntly, at the join of shoulder and neck, making her jerk against him at his barely-contained demony-ness. Whatever his face was doing, he still vibrated with a familiar kind of libido she hadn’t seen from him since he’d gone to fetch the soul; as if being back here, in their home dimension had reawakened that side of him in the way it had been just before the battle.

/Oh./ That, and then a mating… So difficult to remember, with everything that had gone on between them in the interim. All that had transpired while they had been on hold, and reversed, on the other side of that odd veil.

As if in reminder his unneeded breath wafted over his new marks; a familiar intimacy that made her shudder with curling tendrils of renewed want that left her feeling echoingly empty and unsatisfied. His need, turned now fit the shape of her own; like two puzzle-pieces coming together. 

/Soon./ 

Nudging his mouth away from her shoulder, she slipped her thumb down, over the touch of blood at the corner of his lips. Caught it, slipped the finger into his mouth, and closed her eyes, breath catching as he drew it in and sucked, automatically, so as not to spare a single drop of her Slayer blood. “What about you?” she whispered, because he would need to give it back to her, what he had taken. She could feel his growing desperation thrumming through his body, as surely as she could feel his incredible erection pulsing against her belly. 

The relief of feeling him once more made her almost crazy with it, and she had to get him naked soon, get herself naked, and feel him all over her. Inside her, till she could settle down with the sensation. Feel complete with it, get to know him like this, all over again. Had to… 

“I’ll do till we can get back to somewhere more private.”

She blinked at that, nonplussed. “There are about fifty usable rooms in here.” God knew they knew that, since they’d made love, or at least fucked, in approximately half of them. Some of them less than usable, but who was counting?

Spike shook his head, pulling away before she could protest. “Dunno about you,” he informed her roughly, “but I’ve had my bloody fill of this building.” And once again moving more swiftly than she could quite credit, he was tugging her sodden pants back up around her hips, utterly ignoring her noises of protest, the slaps she aimed at his hands as he did so. And glanced up at her as he fastened the button. “I wanna take you to my flat, luv. Will you come? Dreamed of having you there so many times, this last year. I’d love to love you there, just once, before I leave this bloody city.”

She halted mid-protest, startled. And realized belatedly that there was a kind of a shy note in his voice, buried beneath the quiet words. /We’re starting again, in a way, here in the real world. And that place was where he came when we fell apart. So if we’re there together… it’ll be real./ 

She pulled in a deep breath, ready suddenly to plunge back into the other side of the looking glass. It all felt better, more right, now they were right with each other again.

And if everything else flipped the other way, here… nothing between them would. They would see to that.

“Okay,” she breathed, and caught his hand once more. “Let’s go.”

***

It was impossible to know if the rest of LA remembered what had happened to them. What everyone was making of their abrupt return to the moment of their departure to hell. But they did manage to hail a cab down on Pico, despite the dark and the remains of rain. When they stepped in the cabby didn’t talk much, and when he did, his voice sounded awed, shaken, which might indicate that he did remember where he’d been, what he’d seen. Or it might indicate that he was stunned that anyone would be out walking around in a monsoon like this.

Buffy hoped for everyone’s sake that no one but the core group remembered any of it, really. “What’s the address, again?”

Spike gave it lazily and, acting for all the world as if he wasn’t thrumming madly with the wild energy of her blood. And, once given, he dragged her legs over his and pulled her half into his lap to nuzzle her contentedly, nose buried against the new mark on her neck, half back in game face and doing that purring thing like a cuddly, sensuous, maniac jaguar. Because he was running on new, demon-side-up energy and he wanted to drive her insane, make her insatiable. Or maybe get them thrown out of this cab so they’d have to walk the rest of the way to Hill Street. Which, granted, wasn’t all that far when you were used to regular twelve-mile hikes, but not when it was wet as hell out there. 

Who was she kidding? After months in Hell-A her mind was drinking in the moisture, even if her skin didn’t actually need it the way it had before the time-loop had restored them to pre-dehydration status. Still, she’d rather throw him down on the floor of his apartment to continue this conversation than get interrupted by an irate cabby because Spike couldn’t keep himself under wraps for five… 

“You keep squirming on me like that, Slayer, and I’m gonna forget there’re witnesses in here.”

That earned him an incredulous look. “Are you _kidding_ me? This is _your_ fault!”

His eyes twinkled at her, lapis ringed with a growing rim of amber in the dim light of streetlights going by—streetlights! Electricity!—and he smirked. “Smells so damn good, to have you back right again. Can’t wait to mark you everywhere…” She shivered as his fingers slid up her left leg, tickled with light pressure at the pulse-point inside her thigh; so close to where she wanted him that her legs spread without consulting her, and she shifted mindlessly toward his hand. Gasped, on the edge of a moan already, while his need thrummed through her and drove her own higher.

“You make too many noises like that, luv, and we’re not gonna get in the door.”

“Why the _hell_ didn’t we do this back where we were?” she demanded, through gritted teeth. “It was _your_ idea to get back to this apartment of yours!” /I mean, for God’s sake, we survived battles and death and haven’t had a chance to so much as fuck against a wall for days, and I get you needing to smell your mark on me after losing it, but _dammit!_ You’re making me crazy, here!/

He went right on nuzzling like a bastard, purr turning to a low rumble of want and his fingers beating a maddening tattoo on her upper thigh… and she was going to grab his wrist any minute and _shove_ his hand where it belonged and to hell with the cab driver. Goddamned vampire, leaving her unsatisfied before a damn _drive_ ; and what was with _him?_ Usually after blood he was all _over_ her! Not that he wasn’t, kind of, but… “Well, for one thing,” he murmured into her neck, “got to get my duster, innit? Left it there. Have to nab it before we leave town.”

That blasé statement arrested her before she could take matters into her own literal hands, and she froze to stare down at the back of his neck. He could be such a prick. “Well, you’re lucky I left my bag there. That’s my only change of clothes in LA, or you’d be S.O.L., mister.”

“Mmmm…” The rumble did impossibly unfair things to the bite mark, and she gasped again, arching against his hand and fighting for something resembling appropriate pressure. Which he, of course, refused to offer, the asshole. “Ta for coming back with me, luv,” he murmured, lips moving in a clear smirk against her crazed flesh, “since it sounds like it means I’ll be getting you out of your knickers either way.” 

“You’re going to get me murdering you if you keep driving me crazy like this,” she informed him flatly, and fought not to arch against him again, because her body was losing its shit. And she was just now realizing, very belatedly, exactly what was going on. 

_She_ remembered what it all felt like. How to handle it. His bite, his touch. The aftermath of it all. 

But her body didn’t. For her body, post time-loop, this was all new. For her body, this was once again the first time; the first time she had ever been mate-bonded without being drained to the point where she for sure didn’t have the energy for sex, after. Without being forced directly into battle, and then into separation and a massive bout with depression that had turned her libido to dust for months. 

When it came to Spike, her libido had always been the exact opposite of nothing, no matter her state of mind. God, it had driven her crazy that first time, in Hell-A. After Spike had first bitten her in that alley halfway between Downtown and Beverly Hills, it had been all she had been able to do to keep from jumping his bones at every opportunity for the next several hours as she felt him watch her and want her, because the newness of the bond and the linkage it created had seared in their blood and… And there had been more distractions then, luckily, to keep them alive and focused. Things like skirmishes with demons to take the edge off, and traumatized refugees to take care of. But, here and now… there were no distractions whatsoever. 

He had his hands all over her because he could. For the first time in months, no one was out to kill them. And for the first time in months she could respond without worrying about whether the smell of sex and blood would draw a flock of demons who might interrupt their latest bout in hopes of making her into a snack. And, neither of them really had to keep one eye open while they got down. And, alright, fine; this dimension had a few checks in the plus-column. At most, here, they might have to worry about getting dragged down to some police station for a complaint about public indecency. Which she supposed was the only thing Hell-A had had going for it; a severe lack of morals when it came to the modesty department. It had made flaunting one’s sex life in front of everyone kind of… a lot less dangerous, actually. Which… Okay; maybe that, too, was a plus for their home dimension, because she was starting to admit to herself that it was definitely her thing to get down with the public sex and the danger and the naughty ‘what if we get caught’ vibe. Spike…

Spike had honestly never cared, as long as he got to touch her. He had wanted to come up to her bed. She had insisted on the tree. And he wanted to wait now, have her on his bed back at his apartment, when she was all for climbing right up on him in this cab. And she had already gotten off, while he was high as hell on Slayer blood and the triumph of retaking her bond from his despised grandsire. That should tell her something right there.

/Well, dammit./ She could be strong. Outlast him till at least the other side of his door. Besides; she had completely forgotten that he still had his duster back at the apartment. That was so a check in the plus-column. The idea that she would get to see him in that particular article once more made her almost as, ah… hurried as his hands, his mouth, and somehow she managed to find the wherewithal to lean forward, away from said mouth to tap the back of the cab guy’s seat. “Sorry, um… Can you drive faster?”

Cab guy turned back… and really, she could swear she had seen him before. “Anything,” he answered in a strange, hoarse voice. It throbbed with something that sounded like… enormous gratitude. “Anything for you two.”

Buffy blinked. Glanced over at Spike, all her libidinous thoughts arrested briefly in dismay. “Did… Have we met?”

Cab guy tightened up, faced forward. “You, uh… saved my life once. Or maybe it was a nightmare and you were in the worst dream of my life, but…”

It hit her then, and libido fled. /Oh. Oh, man. Everyone remembers. Everyone in the city…/

Spike’s hand tightened on hers, his grip fierce. His game face had very abruptly vanished. “Glad you made it out, mate,” he murmured roughly, sounding shaken.

Buffy felt the same; to her core. Because the PTSD, though! /Especially for the kids…/ 

They were all alive again. But no one would ever be the same.

***

They approached Spike’s tank of an apartment slightly more sobered than they had been before. The cabby wouldn’t take a fare from them, and drove away looking both troubled and gratified as they took the two steps down to the below-street-level abode. “You sure you wanna let this place go?” she asked her guy quietly as he stared at the door. “It’s kinda perfect for a vampire.”

He just shrugged, and then patted at his wet jeans pockets. Grunted in surprise.

“Key still there?”

“Yeah.” He produced it, looked at it with undue interest for a moment. No doubt it had long since been lost back in Hell-A. 

Time-loops were bizarro-world.

As before, he held the door for her, because he always did when he could get away with it. Turned on the lights—lights! God, she might never get over the convenience of electricity again!—before they started down. She took the stairs slowly, wary and with axe held loosely in her hand, not because she thought his place would be the site of an ambush, but because it was just the way she entered most buildings anymore. “I’m glad to have this back,” she told him quietly as she exited into his main space, and brandished the weapon in front of her. “I was kind of sad that it got so beat up.”

“It fits you,” he answered softly. “It’s no Scythe, but…” And she heard the frown in his voice. “Faith have the Scythe, or what?”

“It’s in Scotland.” It was just now hitting her that she would be able to make it in time for the showdown there. That she magically hadn’t failed anyone by coming to get her love. They would still be able to beat the Scourge there, if the bastards hadn’t gotten there already. “The Organization keeps it when I have to fly.”

“Oh, right. Customs and all that rot. They’re right wankers about carrying a decent weapon.” With a smirk he slipped around from behind her and, making a sound that was as much moan as anything she had ever heard from him in bed, he strode quickly up to his couch and snatched up the duster he’d tossed aside a couple of hours and four-and-a-half months ago. “Hello, beauty. I’ve missed you.” And, caressing it like it was another girl he loved, he beamed at it fatuously before swinging it around onto his shoulders and shoving his arms in.

God, it was nice to see it on him again. He’d always looked incomplete to her eyes without it. Like he was missing a limb or something. “Looks good,” she told him quietly, watching with interest. “Probably look better without the incredibly wet clothes, though.”

His eyes shot over to hers and he grinned, a ball of good humor all of a sudden. “Anyone needs to get naked, Slayer, it’s you. I think you promised me a striptease, yeah?” And he nodded pointedly at her bag, lying on the couch beside the spot recently vacated by his coat.

“Sex works a lot better when we’re both naked,” she pointed out blandly as she headed for the bag. Seriously, what was going on with him tonight? He was all over the place. She picked up the backpack, eyed it with a certain trepidation. After a moment she bit the bullet; reached into the front pocket and pulled out the phone she’d left here because she hadn’t wanted it ringing and getting in the way when they were planning their stealth baby-saving mission, god, it all seemed so long ago! Checked the screen. “I have three texts,” she murmured, feeling oddly displaced by the very concept. “Two from Dawn and one from Xander.” It was just so weird to be _back!_

“Oh, yeah?” Drawing a little closer, Spike fiddled with the duster’s collar. Dipped into the inside pockets and, with a triumphant exclamation, came out with a pack of Morleys in one hand and a flask in the other. “Bloody glad I didn’t leave the lighter in here or I’d’ve had to smoke with matches or some sodding Bic all these last months, ‘stead of just when I ran out of fuel…” Shoving the articles back into the coat, he nodded at the phone. “What’s the Bit say?”

Buffy lifted her head, feeling like she was coming out from a long stay underwater. “Um, she says she’s worried, why haven’t I called, what’s the big hush-hush assignment…”

“Oh.” Something rueful colored Spike’s tones, and he nodded briefly. “Didn’t wanna tell her you were coming to get me, is it?”

She lifted her head to regard him, confused. Then, /Oh./ “I didn’t want to get her hopes up. I didn’t know if you’d really be here. If it was all some insane mistake. I wasn’t going to believe it till I actually saw you. Touched you.” It was all too easy to recall, even now, the excruciating agony of that endless plane flight; the horrible teeter-totter of expectation and fear. The trembling terror of that moment when she’d landed in the city, stood outside the bar where he’d been doing his bizarre open mic. “And I didn’t know, after everything,” she finished softly, “if you’d want me. If you’d want to come back with me. So I didn’t want to tell her. Till I knew.”

At some point during this recitation, Spike’s face had gone quiet, expression oddly illegible. “Buffy, shame on you,” he whispered now. “If you didn’t know by then what I’d do, seeing you again, you’re a fool.”

She shrugged. “No one says I’m super confident about guys.” She looked down at the phone. “I should tell her we’ll be on our way back soon.”

He caught her wrist; a lightning-fast move. “Don’t…” 

Her eyes jerked up, met his, caught by the anxiety in his tone. “Spike?”

“Don’t tell her about me yet, yeah? Just… let me surprise her?”

/Okay?/ “Alright, I’ll just tell her I’ll be back soon, and that I’m bringing her… a present?”

Spike snorted then, a little mockingly, and released her wrist. “Let’s hope she won’t want to return it.”

Was he seriously worried about his reception with Dawn? “She won’t,” Buffy told him confidently, and texted her sister. Shot another quick text to Xander, letting him know her likely ETA and that she was alright. Looked up in time to see Spike now squatting in front of a cupboard across from the couch, digging into…

“CDs?” she demanded, actually stunned, and moved closer, staring into the hole behind the cupboard door. There were actually like maybe twenty in there.

Twenty _CDs_. A whole rack of the things, carefully hidden inside the orifice, and just what? “Spike, since when…”

“Just hold on for a tick, yeah? Been dying to play this song since you found me at the open mic…” And to her utter shock he gave up on the squatting and just sat down right there on the floor in front of the cupboard, started pulling jewel cases out from the dark recesses within.

She caught a glimpse of one of the titles on the CDs spilling out from between his fingers. _‘The Ramones; All Time Hits’._ Which, okay, sure, but CDs? “I just thought you’d, you know, be a vinyl guy.” She took another step closer, bemused and deeply curious as he pawed through the pile, apparently seeking a specific one. “Isn’t it, like, sacrilege to play this stuff _not_ on a record player?”

Pulling one particular disc from the morass, Spike lifted his head to eye her with a gimlet glare. “Yeah, pet, it is, but I didn’t exactly decide to settle in here, yeah? Didn’t think to make the investment all over again after I lost everything for the third time in dear old Sunnyhell.” And pulling out what she now recognized to be an extremely small and compact CD player from the same shelf, he popped it open, slapped the CD in, and fiddled with the buttons for a moment. “Here. You should listen to the lyrics of this one.”

/Seriously?/ She knew her vampire was mercurial, but she also knew that he was still thrumming all over, so she was just really deeply confused by this point. She would have thought they would be on the couch, against the wall, or in his bed ten minutes ago, but no. He wanted to play her _music?_

/You know for him you’d do worse/ she reminded herself, so she crossed her arms and leaned against the wall to settle in for a little torture by Punk. And yet, as the first odd _‘plink plink’_ came on she frowned, wondering why it sounded vaguely familiar. “This is something you thought of because of the bar where we…”

“Shh, luv. Listen.”

_‘Darlin’, you got to let me know… Should I stay or should I go?’_

“Oh! I recognize this song! I heard some emo kid play it in high school!”

Spike threw her an irritated look and stopped the music. “Yeah? Means you’re not a total loss, then, despite all that angsty teen shite you and the rest listen to…”

“Hey! I seem to remember going through a lot of angst with a certain vampire during that same…”

_“Listen,_ Buffy.” 

“But why…” And then, belatedly, the words replayed in her mind… and she remembered what she had said to Spike at the open mic. And how he had responded. The sudden sparkle of amusement in his eyes when he had finished her question for her. How she had thought he had been mocking her, telling her to go ahead and just leave… “You jerk! That whole time you were just making fun of me because I was accidentally quoting some old song?” She knew she was blushing now, and had the insane urge to pick something up and throw it at him, all these months later, because how _dare_ he laugh at her when she had come for him like that with her heart in her hands...

“First of all, it’s a _classic_. This is The Clash, pet, and you really need to hear what they have to say. I’ve thought of this song more times than I can count when it comes to me and you, for one.”

She blinked at that, nonplussed. And then, reviewing the words in her head, realized she shouldn’t be all that surprised. “Keep playing the song,” she sighed, and crossed her arms. 

“Just give it a fair listen, yeah?” He hit play.

_‘If you say that you are mine…’_ the whiny-voiced guy wailed, _‘…I’ll be here till the end of time…’_

Well… she supposed that fit for herself when she’d showed up at the bar, and for Spike in general. But just when she thought the song was about to get repetitions, Spike came to his feet. And started to dance.

And that, she realized, was one of the dorkiest, and yet strangely hottest things she had ever watched. He bobbed toward her and back again, head jerking in this completely arrogant way that still had some hint of pleading in it and was all attitude… And abruptly he was in full game face, tongue half out and curled and sneering just a little, in what she had long ago privately termed his ‘Punk look’; challenging and raucous, headbanging as he swaggered in her direction, sidestepping first one way and then the other, arms spread. And he was _singing along_ , because why not also ply her with that damn sexy voice. _“It’s always tease, tease, tease,”_ he mouthed to her, grinning in smug challenge… and startled her when he sank down in front of her. _“You’re happy when I’m on my knees…”_

/Oh, for God’s sake./ Grabbing him by his black lapels, she pulled him to his feet, intending to slap some sense into him. And was instead whirled like a dervish into some bizarre attempt at mutual Punk dancing that made her feel like she had been dragged into a mosh pit; Spike bobbing and grinning while dragging her in a sort of feral, jagged circle of chaotic energy, bouncing and chanting lyrics belligerently and even, occasionally, howling along.

She felt a little bit like he had somehow conjured a concert for her and made her part of the audience as she let him drag her around and stumbled along trying to keep up, watching the entire time with amused fondness and a mild horror that her Slayer coordination and years of dancing at the Bronze had been rendered nil by dint of mere exposure to unfamiliar music. _“If I go there will be troooouble! If I stay there will be doooouble!”_

“Not anymore,” she told him, and wondered if he heard her at all over the swirling cacophony.

He must have heard something, for he shook his head at her and backed away, then sauntered close again, holding the duster open to reveal his sopping wet t-shirt and tugging at his long, dark lapels. _“Exactly who am I supposed to be? Don’t you know which clothes even fit me?”_

/Well/ she thought, pondering the message, /I did like the blue, a little. Not that godawful beige thing./ But this was what she preferred. The black. The red, when he wore it… and _him_. 

Reaching out as he neared, she grabbed hold of said attire and pulled him close. Caught his mouth to kiss him, felt him shift automatically back to William’s face to keep her mouth intact. And grinning, knocked him backward, down to floor. He wanted chaotic, sexy energy? That was exactly what he would get. And he would get it without further delay.

She didn’t bother with foreplay, simply flipped open his belt, began to undo his sopping jeans… and noted as she did so that he was watching her with great interest and approval. 

In the background, The Clash song was ending in a great thrummy, drummy crescendo, and another song was starting up. _‘Hey! Ho! Let’s go!’_ She paused in her work, startled to find she recognized this one too, and how many of these Punk songs had she actually heard in the past, somehow, by osmosis or something? “This isn’t the same band, is it?”

Spike looked mildly put out by the interruption. “No, luv, this is just a compilation of Punk greats.”

The rando British-sounding guys were still shouting the same line repeatedly from the speakers. She decided that it was a fitting song and turned back to her regularly-scheduled jeans-removal project. It took concentration, after all, since they were both soaked. She finally gave up at about his upper thighs, noting as she did so that Spike had taken advantage of her brief distraction to get to work on her own jeans, was already struggling with studious concentration to pull them down. It took some effort on both their parts, but finally with serious teamwork they managed to peel her out of one leg… at which point she sat down on him without further preamble, because the other one would just take way too damn long. Who needed more anyway? His cock was behind her, rubbing against her very wet panties, stuttering over the cleft of her ass as his hands moved up to fondle her breasts under her shirt, shoved it up, expression still totally in his ‘Punk face’ and drifting more back toward game face with every passing second. 

She lifted her arms helpfully so he could dispose of the wet article. It took flight, and his hands went back to their previous station. The bra quickly followed, and her eyes fluttered closed for a moment as he purposely dragged the rough writing callus of his left hand over one nipple. Found herself pressing back thoughtlessly once more against his rutting cock, the sound of him rubbing against damp cotton audible even to her in over the music.

“You’re gonna lose those,” he threatened very solemnly as she rocked back against him. 

“Mmm… I guess that means we’ll have to go lingerie-shopping before we leave town.”

He must have found either the suggestion or her coy tone inspiring, for the underwear very quickly went to where underwear was wont to travel when it died. In this case, up over the back of his couch, to sprawl between there and the wall, and he was fighting to lift her, push her back.

_‘Hey! Ho! Let’s go!’_

Smiling in invitation, she caught hold of his left hand and pulled his fingers into her mouth, eyes steady on him. Heard—or maybe more felt—the low growl start somewhere deep within his chest as she pulled the damp digits down, slid them into her damp, ready pussy, gathering up enough wetness for him to work with… and then pushed them pointedly against her clit. 

He took the hint—not that he ever needed much—and started to work immediately, eyes blazing amber on hers. It took her a moment, then, her breath catching, to remember the next step, but she managed it. Leaned back on her left hand—which incidentally put even more pressure on his hand and aided him in what he was doing to an untoward degree—reached back to catch his cock in her slick-sticky right. Started working him over slowly; not because he needed it (he definitely didn’t, between the blood and the cab-ride), but because it was fun.

“Christ, Buffy.” It was the first thing he had said in a long while.

She didn’t reply. Just lifted up. 

_‘Hey, ho! Let’s go!’_

Smiling down at his rapt expression, she moved back a little… Fought to keep her eyes from rolling back in her head at what he was doing to her with his way-too-talented fingers. Positioned herself over him. “Punk’s… nnnn…. kind of fun for sex,” she admitted.

“Best energy for a good, fast shag,” he agreed around bright amber eyes and teeth that were very happy to see her. His entire being was on the edge; expectant, hopeful… already one very happy boy.

“I’m learning to appreciate it pretty quick,” she informed him, and slid very slowly and purposefully down on the hard length of his pulsating cock. /Oh, God./ What he had been doing to her clit had made— _always_ made—that just the best… The most…

She let out a breath with an effort. Managed to employ still more to talk. “You’re definitely right. We should… Mmmmm… Do this in every room. Nnnnn…. Give this crappy apartment of yours some… personality before we move you out.”

His eyes rolled back into his ridged head, and he moaned as she settled down, commenced squeezing very deliberately with muscles she knew half-destroyed him as she moved. “Bloody hell, Buffy! Bloody… Sodding…”

_‘Hey Ho! Let’s go!’_

She thought she might develop a taste for Punk after all.

***  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
And now we've established that...  
Re-established?  
*devilish grin*  
That apartment needed some personality in it. Just saying.  
It's gonna get more love before they leave town. What with one thing and the other.  
*angelic expression*


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One thing that has happened with quarantine... I can actually get around to posting in daylight. That's new.   
> Huh. As the world turns.  
> I hope everyone is well. Reading about all these illnesses/god-forbid-deaths only one degree separated from me now makes me want to put a force-field or a blankie over all of us. I love every one of you, whether I've spoken to you or not. Be safe, be loved, be well!!! Hope as we all hunker down like Spuffy are doing right now in these chapters, you have someone to snuggle with who's nice to you, and, you know, can send out for yummy food, and have some fun way to pass the time...
> 
> Thematically that should give you a hint about what goes on in the next chapter or so of this tale, since our kids have to clean up from a battle... and then have sunrise coming shortly, now they're back in a place where that's a thing.
> 
> Oh, speaking of... Um... **this chapter has some, ah, bathroom therapy in it,** because running water after fighting in the cold rain. Seemed apropos. Dunno if that's worth a CW, but there it is, just in case.

**S:  
**

Spike ran just the tips of his fingers up along the heated form ticking down to somnolent coolth upon him. Buffy lay on his now-naked chest—in a fit of frustration she had torn away his wet shirt, leaving it hanging in damp shreds to either side of him and pooled under his arms—and made a sound near enough to a purr of her own as he stroked just the pads of them, then the backs of his nails, in slow, alternating tracks over her ribs, the nape of her neck; relearning the terrain of her body.   
  
It had subtly altered over the course of only, subjectively, an hour’s time. /Objectively… Oh, who the bloody hell knows./ But the changes… 

He couldn’t tell if she was thinner now than she had gotten from the truncated diet she’d been on in hell, and that flustered him badly. /Christ, how the bloody hell can the bint have gotten skinnier here, on _this_ side of the thing?/

He had scarcely noticed at first, when she had returned to him, here in this blasted city. How could he have done? She had, after all, exploded back into his life like a supernova, brought his own personal sun back to his minuscule, closed universe; of all evenings, on the day he was meant to die for once and all. Which meant of course that he had seen nothing but her face, her eyes, felt nothing but the touch of her hand telling him she had come for him. That, impossibly, she wanted him; alive, with her, to stay. 

And then they had gone to sodding hell, and after one quick, mind-blowing shag to bond them she had been parted from him for two bleedin’ weeks. It had been no wonder that by the time they had come together again, she had gone a bit spare ‘round the edges. 

Now, though, wearing the body she had carried for all the time he had been gone from her here, he could see, feel, know… she was as bloody thin as she had gotten in that one awful year after her return from the dead, and what the bloody hell was that about, then?   
  
It simply wasn’t right. /How in the name of all the holies did it even soddin’ happen? Didn’t anyone see to it she _ate_ while I was gone?/

Well, he was back now, and he’d see to it she got fed up. No more of his girl running ragged, going about whipcord thin and raw. /Christ, look at you, Buffy./ There was no wasted flesh about his girl at all. And yet, she still fought like a sodding lioness, as always, when it looked like she maybe weighed seven stone on a good day. /Bloody fuck. I’m here now, Love. I’ll see to you./

Apparently unaware of his internal shock and awe, Buffy lay contented as a sated feline on his chest. To his growing delight, he realized that she was describing little circles and curlicues and odd shapes of her own along his chill flesh with her fingertips; warming him with every feather-light touch.

Though they had done this a hundred times in that other place, somehow it seemed all the more precious, here, in this dimension. Like she was telling him they hadn’t, would never change.

To say he merely loved her was to damn her with faint praise. /Not enough words in any bloody language./

He thought he might sigh contentedly, like some sort of pleased feline, if she kept doing that. Which would have been embarrassing, if he could muster the slightest regard for his reputation to ever be embarrassed around her again. He supposed, however, that that proposition seemed unlikely at this late stage of the game.

She had chosen him again. Jesus fuck; he had been terrified, when the loop had snapped back, and he had felt the abrupt loss of her, the abrupt loss of the bond. The tearing away of her from his blood, as if she had never been. The hollow, aching absence had been like a death, an amputation; her confusion over it clear as day.   
  
Her moment of realization, a nexus moment for his entire being.

Bound in that moment, to another, she had looked on him… and turned her back, once and for all, in sound mind, on Angel. And _chosen_ him.

Fucking God. That she might do that, while possessed of one stronger than he, more powerful, older; one who could in fact, if needs be, command him? That she might come to him and beg that he take away Angel’s bond and replace it with his own was… /Christ./

Now she lay with him, his once more and as loving as ever, and it was as miraculous a moment as he had ever known. With his demon well up, standing toe-to-toe with the soul as it had not been for the entirety of their time while largely quiescent in the last two years, and in hell… bleeding Christ, he had never felt so warm. So complete. Her exceedingly hot palm covered his nipple—the one not being warmed by her ear—as if she were holding his unbeating heart in her hand. And, fuck, he couldn’t help it. He moaned just a little, breath catching as if he needed it for something. Felt her smirk against his sternum; and hell. She was allowed to be smug. 

“I love you,” he whispered anyway, and bloody hell, it was never anything short of a miracle that he could say that now, so freely and so easily, secure in the knowledge that she would hear it without fear. Might even say it back—and _mean_ it—and holy sodding fuck, how was this his unlife? What in this world had he ever done to earn even a moment like this, much less all he had already enjoyed of her? “I don’t know what I did to have you here, Buffy, but I’ll keep earning it. I swear; I’ll never stop…”

Burning fingers slid up. Stopped his lips to lay across them, and then came away again to re-cover his nipple. “You don’t have to keep score to keep me,” she whispered back. “I love you, the end. And besides…” And here her voice turned fierce. “If it comes to tallying up stuff you’ve done in columns, I think world-saveage and helping with world-saveage and killing baddies with me every night for years and rescuing people for months while you half-starved yourself and all the rest definitely counts.” She tensed a little against him, her voice hardening perceptibly. “And if it comes down to adding more points in that column and killing yourself to do it or staying with me, I think you know where I stand on that.”

He winced at the way her palm had tightened a little, pinching at his nipple. Covered her hand with his own; partially in self-defense and partially to soothe. “Not going anywhere, Buffy. I promise.” Though, granted, sometimes his promises kind of ended up shortsightedly fucking off a little in execution when he was busy being a hotheaded ass. Two instances came to mind, to his endless shame. Sodding off with Dru and leaving Buffy to deal with the ponce before all was said and done, back when she had barely been out of Pampers; that was one. Didn’t matter that they had been enemies then, in an uneasy alliance, and all his loyalty to his Dark Princess. He’d given his word, hadn’t he? Hadn’t done all he could have, and left before the job was entirely finished.

Much worse a betrayal, though, what he had done back in Hell-A. Not enemies then, but lovers. Closer than. And he had just fucked off to go risk his unlife without her, after giving her a ration of shit for doing the same to him only days before… and gotten himself dusted twice for his pains, right in front of her eyes, because he was a fucking impatient, thoughtless idiot. 

How she was still forbearing enough to love him was beyond his comprehension. How she could bring herself to trust him, still, with her background with men, was honestly a miracle. He had no doubt that he had caused cracks that would come back to haunt them at some point, and he hastened to qualify his statement before those doubts could push the crevasse wider. “I know I’ve… not given you a lot of reasons lately to trust that I…”

“Stop,” she whispered against his chest, and her fingers were on his lips once more, forestalling further protestations. “The one thing I’ve learned about this demon named Spike, is that if he ever hurts me, and sees it, he will move heaven and earth to avoid making that same mistake again. He went to Africa and fought to bring this soul back, put himself into permanent bondage because he made a mistake and he saw what it did to me. He didn’t trust himself anymore, and he knew I didn’t, and he couldn’t stand that.” Her head turned a little so that her lips moved ticklishly against him, breath coming short against his chest. “But the thing was… it was that that tells me I _could_ have. So…” She dropped her hand away from his mouth, lightly kissed his chest. “I know for a fact that you won’t ever do that again. No matter who’s driving. And not because of the soul. Whichever side of you’s up front…” She pushed herself up then to meet his eyes, steady and certain. “You won’t ever hurt me like that again.”

It was a demand for affirmation, for oath, as much as it was reassurance from her end. Christ knew he would give that pledge and glad of it. “I won’t. I swear.”

Nodding, she settled back to his chest and returned to her finger-games, giving him a moment to compose himself. Because she knew him, felt him again now, knew he was fighting to lock away the tumult. He managed after a moment to control his breathing, the shudders there that came all too close to sobs; because she had _forgiven_ him. She _believed_ in him. Christ; still. 

She was a fucking miracle, and he would rather dust a thousand times than ever let her down again.

Her fingers, moving ticklishly, dipped up to just above his nipple to brush his pec, and he felt her frown. “I never did get around to asking you about this scar. How did you get it?” She pushed up a little to regard the dip, frown deepening. “It looks… really dangerously close to your heart.”

/Well… damn. I guess Soldier-Boy never told you that little story./ Of course, he wouldn’t have. “Had a bit of a visit from your ex once,” he informed her blandly.

_“Excuse_ me?”

“Captain Cardboard. Was right brassed I’d told you what he was doin’ behind your back at the suckhouse, yeah? So he came by my crypt for a little visit. Gave me that as a nice memento; to remind me that he might be losin’ you, but I’d never have you, because I was just a shite excuse for a vamp who couldn’t even bleedin’ fight back.” The bitterness colored his tones, he knew; but then, that confrontation still rankled. The humiliation that he’d had to, as always, tuck his tail between his legs and permit someone as breakable as a fucking human hopped up on steroids to threaten him with nonexistence—that someone so useless as that wanker got to touch, to have, his golden goddess, and he couldn’t even throw a sodding punch!—because that fucking chip they’d welded to his brain had rendered him worse than a muzzled dog. 

The fine tremor that wound through him could not be stopped as the body-memory swept him; of all the times he had been beaten like that dog; chained and muzzled while the blows descended, and all he’d had to fight back with had been his mouth. Cutting remarks, insights that tore his enemies to shreds… and eyes that saw all, and knew. The privilege of realizing that the crack team wasn’t so solid after all. The privilege of slithering inside the fold, if he could play his cards right. 

And finally, in the end, to recognize the gift for what it was. That he could come close. Undermine the Slayer. Know her. Learn her weaknesses.

Fucking fall endlessly in love with the mad bint, damn his everything. 

Sodding chip had been the making and the breaking of him.

Buffy, he realized belatedly, was shaking as she ran hesitant fingers over the old wound. “Riley… _staked_ you?” she whispered, and he heard horror in her voice, read it in her posture, felt it echo through the link of their shared blood. And her eyes, lifting to meet his, were filled with a viridian dread that coiled his belly with regret. 

“Well, it didn’t take, yeah?” he answered quietly. “Sodding sadist had someone make him a plastic one. Looked real enough, though. Thought I was a goner till I didn’t dust. Hurt like bloody hell, though, and took me the fuck of a long time to heal…”

He yelped when her fingers tightened on him; around the scar, and at his other side, digging in hard. “Fuck, Buffy!”

“Sorry,” she whispered, and released him. But he could see that she was rocked. She was breathing hard, head down, and he thought he smelled tears. 

/Oh, Christ./ “It was a long time ago, Love…”

Her head rose, and yeah, those were tears collecting in her eyes. Angry, regretful ones. “Oh, Spike, I’m so sorry… That you couldn’t fight back. That he could do that to you and you had to take it. That it was because you were trying to help me. And… for all the times I did the same thing to you and you couldn’t…”

He couldn’t stand it. Hated to see her cry. Had to brush the evidence away. “Don’t, pet. Please. For one, I definitely had ulterior motives for what I did with Soldier-Boy, yeah? It was all just how the game was played back then. No wrong or right; just who wanted what from whom.” He saw her recoil, knew why, now he had the added insight from the bloody soul. “Anyway, it was forever ago. Bloke’s long gone, and you’re with me. That’s all that matters…”

“No.” She batted his hand from her face. “It’s not. I hurt you, and I encouraged other people to hurt you like you were some kind of public punching bag, and it is not _okay!”_

/Well, fuck./ “Buffy…” What could he say? It hadn’t felt okay. He’d said it once, in the beginning, that he thought he was being mistreated, but no one had paid a single jot of attention. And… well, after a point he had come to take that mistreatment as a matter of course. His ticket price for the show, his insanely high cover charge for a bad seat at the venue that was his daily dose of Buffy. And he would have paid it a thousand times over if it meant spending a single second in her company… even at a distance. To smell her scent and hear her voice; listen to her give orders and organize the troops and give him stiffy after pointless stiffy with her incredible power as it drifted through the room and drove him mad with the pendulum of raging need and incredible tenderness when, in those few times her all-too-necessary steel had failed her, she had faltered into uncertainty, or pain, or hurt, and needed someone to stand behind her and lend his voice.

He especially had to be there for those. To have her back when the others, inevitably, spoke up against her; those sodding, spineless clowns who thought they could speak against the Slayer who was their leader, and who had saved all their worthless arses a half a dozen times or more each and was worth a hundred of them. Christ, he would have dusted to cradle her in his arms, then, when she needed someone. But she had never permitted him. Never even let him come close. Till the end. And then…

By the end he had been yoked by then to something far more organic than the bloody chip. And in the interim… Well. The chip hadn’t really made a single sodding bit of difference either way in how he felt about her, had it? He could have hurt her anytime if he’d wanted, or just left. Gotten free. /But you didn’t want to be free. You only wanted her to keep you. Wanted her to want you./ 

Harris and the rest all had it wrong, the entire time. They had all thought his obsession had been about wanting to possess their friend and hero. It had never been that. He had only ever wanted, needed her to take him on. Own him willingly, and accept that which he had proffered from the start. /Because it’s floating in a void when you no longer hold the deed to yourself, Buffy, but the one who owns you won’t hold tight to the other end of your being. Leaves you adrift and anchorless, and without meaning, until the One decides to take pity. Give you a port in the storm to hold you safe. You held me safe, those few days. Those few weeks; in the sure knowledge that, if at least I no longer belonged to myself, and never would… at least I still belonged to _someone_./

He had never belonged to anyone else as assuredly as he belonged to Buffy Summers. And, by some miracle beyond all comprehension, she had chosen to become his port; to anchor his being through all the storms. And by it, she had permitted him to be, too, her harbor; a gift he could never have imagined in all his long days. “Everything’s alright,” he whispered to her, and soothed her by dint of a caress which pushed her hair back behind her ear. Caught her eye. “You’ve made me yours. I’m safe, now.”

It rocked her, and she lowered her mouth to his. Whispered to his lips. “So am I.”

“Yeah,” he breathed. “Always.”

To hell with dimensions. Kissing her was coming home. 

***

He really hoped she didn’t include this room in her reclamation list.

He listened, of course, standing in the doorframe with his back leaning against the jamb, as she struggled out of the remains of her wet clothes. He would never come into any bathroom again while she was in there. Hadn’t, the entire time they were being all domestic in Hell. Heard her use the bog, pause, run the tap in the sink and make a satisfied noise. Which he couldn’t blame her for, since he had half a mind himself to maybe run his head under the one in the kitchen, just for the sheer joy of it. 

Once the loo stopped running, there came the unmistakable sound of sodden jeans hitting the floor, and he couldn’t help it. He had to turn and watch. Did so, with his hands in his pockets, though he made sure never to cross the threshold, as she dropped the crimson blouse on the pile, where she’d recovered it from the main space. The lovely patch of her rich, dark, reddish-gold fuzz gleamed in the unforgiving, bald light of the single, uncovered bulb over the sink—least it wasn’t a damn fluorescent—and hell. She looked amazing no matter what light she was in, but it was odd to see her back in this one and not in that permanent, orange pall. 

She looked like she had when he’d first seen her, reappearing in his life like inexplicable magic on the eve of battle last night and four-plus months ago. She was missing the tan she’d gotten in hell, and she looked pale and a bit drawn, if in a different way than she had simply from the lack of vitamins and the short rations in Hell-A. And she bloody well glowed. 

Her trousers were already kicked away, and, well… he’d long since put paid to her knickers. Maybe while she showered he might retrieve those from off against the wall, pocket them as a souvenir because, well, once a demon, always a demon. Her kit disposed of she turned, totally at ease in his presence—which, he supposed, was progress for them—and bent a bit—/Bloody Christ!/—to turn on the shower tap. 

While she was waiting for the hot water to come in, she started poking at his bottles and things. “Whaddya got here, what does Spike use in the shower…” she mused, more to herself than to him as she prodded his bath items. She’d probably be disappointed in the body wash. He didn’t recall precisely what it had been; something suitably manly with the false advertisement on it that indicated he was meant to come out smelling like a pine forest or an ocean or something similar. But the hair stuff… She was like to be pleasantly surprised there.

Her head popped out of the little glass cubicle and, as predicted, she was holding up a bottle for his inspection. “This is salon grade!” she half-asked, half-exclaimed.

He ran a hand down over his mussed head of semi-tamed curls. “Yeah, well… I only get the one head of hair, yeah? Doesn’t hardly grow anymore once you’re dead; maybe a quarter-inch a year. No more than do the nails, so if you don’t want to end up bald after the first fifty, you’ve got to take care of it.” He smirked. “Though, never have to worry about male pattern baldness, so there’s that.”

She blinked at him, surprised. “I thought it was taking forever to see some roots in Hell-A,” she admitted, clearly astounded. “So, when you bleached it…”

“Only had to do it the once,” he confirmed with a short nod. “Touch it up maybe twice a year. Damn near permanent as a tattoo. Big decision, cuts and hair-dye, when you’re a vamp.”

“Wow,” she responded as she assimilated that bit of information. “I guess it cuts down on wear-and-tear, though.”

He dropped his hand from the back of his head. “A bit. Hair dye in the seventies was a bit more uncompromising.” He jerked his chin at the stream coming from the shower head. “You’ve got steam, pet. Best get in before the geyser runs out.”

“Oh!” Leaning over again to replace the bottle—sod his bloody life—she hopped quickly in… and promptly began making sounds that had his fists clenching into tight balls and his nails digging into his palms as if he hadn’t just had her, because, bloody hell, did she have to sound so fucking _pleased_ about it?

He couldn’t help but look, because he liked to torture himself. And, yeah, the glass was that garbage with the divots that made it difficult for even vampire eyes to see through, but he could definitely still make out the shape of her; moving sensuously and with clear enjoyment as she exposed every last inch of herself to the cascade of heated liquid. He could bloody well see the splashes as the water ran down her body to define her every move, and Christ; just the form of her in colored silhouette was enough to damn near destroy him. Her moaning was for damn sure not helping. 

His sodding prick, the insatiable fucking thing, was pretty sure it knew what that was all about, and frankly, he was having a fairly difficult time of it right now trying to convince himself that he wouldn’t mind getting a bit warmed up and sod the rules. He needed to behave himself. /Probably you should leave, you idjit. Try that head in the sink bit—in the kitchen, mind—but anyways, get the fuck out!/

The words were out of his mouth before he could censor them. “You want to share the water?” 

If he had a working heart, it would have stopped beating when he heard his own words. Especially when he caught her response. The way her heartbeat stuttered, the way her current moan cut off abruptly as if he had sliced it with a knife, and fuck. He needed to get _out_ of here. 

Cursing himself, he made to flee. /What the fuck are you _thinking?_ Say something to fix it and get the fuck _out!_ / “I mean, never mind. I’ll catch the next one. Vamps do fine with lukewarm, yeah?” Point of fact, most of his showers tended to be cooler than humans liked. “It just sounds right lovely.” He turned to go, wondering if there was some way he could punch his own stupid goddamned head right through the cinderblock wall; started away calling himself twenty kinds of fool, because why hadn’t he just left to go have a wank in the main room or his bedroom or what have you while he listened to the music she was making? It wasn’t like those four walls hadn’t seen him toss off enough times over the last year! Now he was going to have to run off to try to stake himself instead, because he was an unutterable idiot…

He started so hard he nearly tripped when he heard the door pop ajar behind him. “Come on in. The water’s fine.”

Her voice halted him in his tracks. He froze, incapable of moving an inch either way. /Did she really just say that?/

More importantly, did she really mean it. 

He thought he might hyperventilate, and that was bloody impossible for his kind. But that was how it felt to be Spike right now, as he re-ran her reply through his mind. No hesitation there, clear invitation, warm. But…

/Fuck./

Forcing himself to steady a bit, he turned his head enough to see the room again, and listened. Really _listened;_ to her breathing. How it had quickened. Her heart. It had done the same. Which could be anxiety over the step they were taking, or… anticipation, and he really could never take the risk of confusing the two again. “Actually, Buffy, it’s fine. I’ll wait. Sorry, I…”

Impatience abruptly threaded into her voice, and now her head was peeping out past her hand. “Will you just get in here, Spike? You’re letting all the steam out.”

Oh. Bloody. Christ, this was going to happen. “Right. Sorry.”

The door snapped closed, leaving behind a tiny puddle, and with a short, unnecessary breath he turned the rest of the way round to dodge into the formerly-off-limits, tiled room. Stuck to the easily-understood task that was following orders, because that meant no thinking. Glad to be rid already of his torn, wet, soiled tee he quickly went to work removing his sodden jeans, struggled out of the now horribly-rigid boots. And then stood, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides and feeling far more naked than he had ever felt simply unclothed, as he faced the shower door. “Alright then.”

The door popped open a crack. “Get in here,” she repeated.

Maybe Christ actually took pity on demons with souls?

He sidled in, feeling as if he should make himself a bit smaller than usual, maybe avoid touching her as much as possible. Of course she put paid to that notion right away, bulling through things the way she had a tendency to do because she was a right courageous bint. “Here,” she told him unceremoniously, and slapped a bottle into his hands the instant he’d tugged the flimsy door closed. “Can you do my hair?” And then, while he stood dumbly with the wee, warmed bottle in his palm, she tilted her head back and let the hot water simply pour right over her.

/Oh, fucking bloody sodding Christing God…/ The cooling spray, as it bounced off her body, warmed him far more than anything had a right to; struck him all over like very small pepper shot, and was as fatal as daggers. Because just the sight of her, standing there with the water cascading down her succulent self was perfection, and far better than the best pornography he had ever seen in his life. 

It was sublime art, and holy fucking Christ, how was he going to get through this intact?

It was a mistake to draw the deep breath he didn’t need. Fuck, why had he done that, and brought the scent of warm, wet, lovely Buffy curling through his nose, his brain? Bleeding Christ, if he could smell that every day he’d quit smoking; could they _bottle_ that? All too aware of what it was doing to him, he hurriedly soused some amount or other of the familiar-smelling shampoo into his hand—was that enough? Too much? She had the fuck of a lot of hair—and resisted the urge to sniff the stuff like cocaine to block out the delectable smell of Buffy and steam, because he was a fucking masochist and he’d rather dust right now than stop scenting her no matter what it was doing to his wavering control. Reached out tentatively, instead, to begin the business of working the handful into her scalp… and bit back a tortured groan when she moaned in response and dropped her forehead to his chest in a gesture of utter surrender to his touch, because fucking fucking _fuck_ , she was trying to kill him. 

Somehow he persevered; mostly out of incredible adoration for every part of her, and out of amazement for the sheer gift he was being given. Trust.

The sensation of the shampoo, slick on his fingers, was a new kind of magic as he slid them in a pressing caress behind her ears (yes, he was a goddamned masochist, but he would hear that moan again, and again, fuck his life). More so as he slid all ten of them deep into her nape to massage there while she shivered against him and made sounds that would probably haunt his dreams for the next, oh, decade, easily. Maybe century. Jesus fuck.

It was surprising, despite the awareness of all the time-loop had taken from them, to scrub lovingly at her scalp, at the part of her stunning golden locks, and find no long-invaded grit; to draw his fingers out through the long ends and find no brittle strands, no damage. But, of course, all that was but a memory. Changed nothing for them as to how incredible the shower felt, but as far as their bodies were concerned this was nothing new. Kind of ruined the reunion with plumbing a bit. Not that he wasn’t glad that her hair was back to its former glory. He thought her incredible no matter what, but after Hell-A he was a bit sad to admit, privately, that she was probably right in her assessment that she would need some sort of emergency trimming upon their return to the flipside. 

She’d not need it now. His gorgeous goldilocks. 

He knew he was drawing the job out a bit upon his second pass back up to her scalp for another bitty massage, felt her smile against his chest. But then, he’d come to the point where he was almost able to focus on the job of it, whatever distracting fucking noise she was making at the moment.

She shifted a little against his sternum, her hands sliding down his body in a way that made him tighten up. She was getting dangerously close to his hips and his thoroughly-impressed stiffy, which wouldn’t at all do. “You enjoying this?” she murmured, and he heard the amusement in her voice, damn her.

He managed to shift his hips away a little, somehow, while he went right on with his scalp massage. “Too bloody right. You go right on making those sounds, yeah? My prick can go right on being confused about it, and I’ll die a happy man.”

She snorted a little and lifted one hand away to rub her nose as the water tickled it, going by, then subsided against his chest, amazingly relaxed… and utterly trusting. Which was a fucking gift he didn’t deserve, and Christ God, what had he ever done to get this second chance with her?

Best not push it, though. Aside from the fact there was the water to consider. The geyser wouldn’t hold out forever, for one. “Suppose that’ll do.” He knew she’d hear the regret in his voice as he released her head. Saw it in the small smile on her face as she lifted away, leaned back with hands on her temples to begin the business of rinsing. And, fuck him all the way to hell; she was leaning back now, arching into the water so that her tits jutted right out at him, her washboard abs defined as hell, and she was like some woman in a commercial about beer like waterfalls in Tahiti; only it was _Buffy,_ standing there with the water and the foam pouring over her, the suds coming down in rivulets between her breasts…

He was a fucking pillock, but he couldn’t help it; had to catch himself up and hold on tight to choke it off, because, bloody fucking _fuck!_

She emerged from the stream at the most inopportune time, tucking one lock of soaked red-gold hair behind her ear, and opened her eyes to see him like that, near undone. Damn her. And, of course, amusement lit her eyes; and maybe something that might have been… triumph? “Did you almost come from watching me rinse shampoo off my hair?”

His chest was heaving, and he hated being caught out nearly spilling himself like an untaught fucking teen, but this was _Buffy_. “Alright, dammit,” he managed a bit hoarsely, “but you don’t know what you looked like. Like a bloody Goddess. Aphrodite risen from the sea to bless all men with the plenty of her body; dangerous and fickle and gorgeous and bounteous as the tide, or…”

“You’re getting poetic.” She smiled at him like an indulgence, then in a move so sudden that he didn’t even see it, caught him by the shoulders and pivoted him so that he, out of nowhere, was the one under the tap.

He yelped in shock as the hot water struck his frigid, rain-stippled back. “Oi! Warn a bloke, yeah?” It really was far hotter than he tended to go, especially after a night spent out fighting in the goddamned rain, and his borrowed blood rose in stunned amazement to rush to the area as if he’d been abruptly covered all over with hot wax. 

Then, of course, every muscle that had ever existed in back and shoulders abruptly went limp with relaxation, because they were well-trained for this sort of thing. He was even able to focus on the sensation, since only half his blood was still in his cock, and thank god she knew about that trick now. She’d taken pity on him. /Thank you, Love./ “Oh, Christ, that’s nice.” He exhaled… or tried to, but there was nothing to exhale, since he’d already exclaimed out all his breath. Groaned a little and rolled his shoulders and neck under the spray. 

“It is pretty great, isn’t it?” Buffy agreed, watching him with, as he opened his eyes to peek, an odd, smug expression on her face. 

“Mmm. Hell yes.”

“Alright. Duck your head.”

“Mmm? Oh. Right.” Prepared to follow commands to the letter while he was in here, he leaned back and wetted his hair, tingling with the heat of the water as it rushed over his face. 

“Okay.” As he emerged and opened his eyes, curls dangling idiotically before them, he was surprised to find her hands approaching him, cupped, with shampoo in them. “Any special instructions for vampire hair?”

He jerked in shock. “I can wash my own hair, Buffy.”

“I know.” Her eyes on his were sober, but with a flicker of what he thought might have been amusement at his defensiveness. “But you took care of me, so I thought…” And she watched him, patiently. 

/Bloody hell./ He honestly wasn’t sure how much he could stand of her touching him in here, but… For right now, the crisis seemed past, so. “Be gentle with me.” And what had possessed him to say _that_ , too, in here, like a bleeding dunce? But her lips quirked as she caught his head in her hands and pulled it further out of the spray. 

“I’m only not when you want me to be rough.” And she proceeded to work the warmed shampoo into his hair with an incredible tenderness that very promptly put a lump in his throat.

She was bloody taking _care_ of him. No one had ever…

“How did you take care of your hair when you were living in the crypt?” she asked curiously, breaking into his staggered thoughts.

He had to swallow a couple of times to clear his throat. “Oh. Ah… Stole away to break into the Y once in a bit. Whenever we got too covered in nastiness from a fight, yeah? Or I sponged off. Cleaned the hair with a bucket, since there was a tap outside the crypt, over near the VanOwen mausoleum. Think it was where they watered the lawns from…” 

“Sounds cold.” And clearly she disapproved, in retrospect, of his self-care regimen. Or perhaps that that was all he’d had to fall back on.

“Yeah, well; vampire.” He fluttered a dismissive hand, deeply distracted by the feel of her fingers rubbing with slow, gentle insistence at his scalp. “Used to being a bit chilly, innit?” He would _not_ moan, he would _not_ …

She was silent for a moment as she worked away at his head, rather a bit longer than strictly necessary, though he wasn’t about to complain about getting a scalp massage from her. He was like to crawl right up into her in a mo’, though, wrap his arms around her, bury his face in her neck, and just breathe her scent for a part of forever. 

She was making a bit of a job of it, too, as he had with her, and was she also making up for all of that imaginary grit stuck in there from their sojourn in Hell-A? Or was she simply trying to return the favor of the longish time he had spent on her head? 

“I love your hair. I never told you.”

He jerked again, for maybe the ninth time, because she seemed determined to keep him off-balance tonight. “What?”

“Is this water way too hot for you?” she went on, swerving wildly to another topic before he could even catch up.

He was going to end up crashing into a wall if she didn’t stop jumping all over the damn place. “Hm? Oh. Bit hotter than I’m used to using,” he responded in a distracted fashion, and waved it off. “Don’t mind.”

“I can turn it down.”

He lifted his head a little to fix her with a playful glare. “Don’t move a muscle.” 

She paused, playful in return, fingers unmoving in his curls.

Literal fucking chit. “Oh, bloody… Except for those magic fingers.”

With an altogether too teasing a smile, she went back to her bit of scalp-massage. “I especially like your hair like this. All curly and loose.”

/Oh./ Was she being candid about that? Hell-A had made the loose locks a necessity, of course. No gel to be found, after a bit, and too little water to spare by the end for regular washing. And in the basement… Tousled and mad as a hatter hadn’t exactly been his best look, he’d thought. How could she fancy… He made an annoyed noise and muttered an imprecation about his poofter mane, figuring that ought to tell her all she ever needed to know in the manner of his opinions on the subject.

“No. I mean, I get why you gel it back to fight, but…” She paused again, thoughtful. “It’s like, _this_ look? Is for me. It’s _mine_. It’s… your softer side.”

/Bloody hell./ “Poofy wee William…” he protested.

“Shut up and let me enjoy your curls.”

He shut it. Because who was he fooling? She got any part of him she wanted. The deed had been signed away ages ago. She wanted the bloody stupid curls, she got them, on a silver platter.

After a beautiful eternity she slipped away, he thought regretfully, and nudged him back into the spray. He went with equal regret, and let the suds roll out of his hair. And was surprised anew when, as he reopened his eyes, he found her standing in front of him pouring conditioner into her hand. “About this much?” she asked, looking quite serious. And then she peered closer at the label. “This is really nice stuff.”

“Yeah, that’s about right. And yeah; I told you. Got to take care of the _cheveaux_ , or I’ll lose it. Nearly did, in my punker days. And if I ever ran into a bad acid-spitting demon or summat, I’d be bald on one side for twenty years or some damned thing, till it had time to grow back finally.”

“No magickal healing for vampire hair, huh?” She looked pouty at that. “Hardly seems fair, when obviously your toenails must grow back.” 

She had a point there. He’d never bothered to wonder about it. “Eventually. Only if they get ripped clean off, but they don’t grow out fast enough to need, you know, regular maintenance.” 

“Good. I don’t like being poked.” She had that mysterious look in her eyes again as she warmed the conditioner in her palms. “I like what you do with your fingernails, though, for the record. Wouldn’t want to see those go anywhere.”

For all the conversational tone, he knew Buffy flirting when he heard it, and Christ, was she trying to drive him directly off his trolley?

“No wonder you kept your head away from all that dragonfire,” she went on, back to nattering innocently about the hair as if she hadn’t just been damn near tugging at his cock. 

Course, she was right-o when it came to it. So he cleared his throat and went on gamely, doing his best to keep up. “Got it in one, luv.” He nodded at the bottle she was setting aside. “Do a hot oil treatment once a month, too.” He frowned. “Bit overdue on that.”

“I love you.”

That jerked his gaze back to her. “What brought that on?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head and approached, cupped hands advanced. “Here.”

He let her condition him, feeling mildly affronted. “Willing to bet Captain Forehead has a whole haircare regimen too, with that foofy bit he has on top of his dome. In fact, I know he does.”

“I have no doubt.” She kept a straight face as she worked the conditioner very thoroughly in, but he knew the fine note of fond amusement in her voice by now, and it put his back up. 

“Nothing says that lot that is just for women,” he defended. “We all have hair.”

She grinned openly at that. “I would never want a single thing to happen to this hair,” she told him staunchly, and ran a caressing hand over his conditioner-slicked locks. “I’d let you give me a hot oil treatment too, but I guess the time-loop fixed how fried mine was. Good thing too, since I’d probably use all yours up, with how damaged it was. Or I’d need to spend about a month at the salon to fix the damage Hell-A did to me.”

Slightly mollified, he reached out to finger her damp locks. “It was a bit dried out, pet, but still lovely as ever.”

“In need of serious work,” she contended flatly. “Your opinion doesn’t count, since you think I look good covered in Chiraago venom.”

“Well. That doesn’t negate the fact that…”

“That you’re completely biased. C’mon. We’ll leave that on you for a while. Stop hogging the hot water. My turn.” And with a challenging smile, she plopped the conditioner bottle into his hand and turned them in a little shuffle so that she could dunk her head back under the tap. “I need the therapy,” she half-moaned, and let the water pour down her body, and oh, Christ… 

He squirted out some indeterminate amount of conditioner without really paying attention, sluicing it into his hand as if it would do any good trying to warm it up on a room-temperature body, then moved like an automaton to apply. And fought with himself to keep his hands where they belonged and focused on the task at hand when she just let her entire body rock along with his ministrations. Fought to remain somewhat a man of business with her breath once more catching in little shudders under his prodding, when she moaned flat out at the tugging as he worked the stuff down the long tail of her mane. All of her was supple and pliable under his hands… and bloody fuck, the other men had been unutterable idiots to let this go. If they had even done this with her; that git Riley, and with Angel on the day he’d taken back like a fucking moron. Because this? 

Hell, compared to the starvation diet he’d once had around her—not that she had owed him anything, but still—just to think he would ever have _this_ was beyond credence. And to think that he had, once upon a time, played that night she’d gotten out of bed and dressed behind him over and over again in his mind’s eye while he’d had empty wank after furiously empty wank for months back before they’d begun this. Now, to have something like _this_ as fodder? 

This was lovely torment.

“You only get that noise in your throat when you’re about to seduce me,” she commented, and it was the first sound to come from her that wasn’t some inarticulate pleasure-moan in a long while. And he half-thought some of them might have come from him. And her comment was hardly fair, but he needed to get himself in hand here. So to speak.

“You never did take much seducing, Buffy,” he managed, trying for brisk, and capped the bottle decisively. “But even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t dare take you away from this shower right now unless I knew for sure you wanted it.” Her eyes opened to regard him with surprise. “You’re enjoying it too bloody much,” he pointed out blandly. “You started this relationship a long while before I came into the picture. Best not to interfere.” With a final, almost vindictive screwing-on of the bottle, he set it aside and gave a little nod. “Alright then. Think you’re ready for the leave-in.” And yeah, he knew he sounded hoarse, but she was probably lucky he was coherent at all.

To his stunned amazement she smiled at that and slid her arms around his neck. And turned them so that he was under the tap. “Okay,” she whispered. “Soap me up.”

He stood there for a moment in something like shock, with conditioner sluicing over his brows and down his body. And saw the challenging light in her eye. “Oh bloody hell,” he groaned. “Buffy…”

“I think you know your way around my body.” Reaching over, she began to poke at his bottles and things. “This all you have? This ocean thing? Sounds kind of rough on the skin. I’m going to need a moisturizer at some point…”

He was reduced to breathing hard through his nose, clenching his fists and unclenching them. “What the bloody hell are you playing at?” he managed to her lovely posterior, and fought for stability.

She didn’t turn back. “Healing,” she answered simply, and picked up the body wash.

He was struck utterly dumb by her response. “Healing…” he croaked after a moment, feeling a bit like a strangled parrot.

She turned back, eyes absolutely steady on his. “Yes. Healing. And making new memories.” She held up the bottle. “I want us to keep living together without all these little pockets of anxiety. And I’m tired of the off-limits spaces.”

Christ, she was a brave soul. He’d already known that, of course… but could he be as brave? Heard his own voice shaking. “Buffy, I don’t know if I can.”

She went still. Nodded and made to set down the bottle. “Okay.”

He caught her hand, panicked at the way her courageous light had so abruptly dimmed. “Wait. Just wait. I… Fuck.” Shoved a hand backward through his hair, flinging water and the remains of conditioner away against the tile. “Christ…”

“You don’t have to. I don’t want to make you do anything you’re not ready for. I just thought…”

He couldn’t take it. Not with that tremulous note of disappointment in her voice, all twisted up with uncertainty, as if she felt bad for pushing him too far. Had her pulled up against him before he could think it through. Was kissing her, and she melted against him, her arms around him. Was holding her, and oh, fuck, he was a useless nancy twat, but she could lay waste to him with a single inflection, the slightest change of expression; he was owned as hell, might as well put on the bleeding collar. “Anything you want, Buffy, oh, fucking God…”

“Only if you want it too.”

That set him to trembling again, because of sodding _course_ he wanted it, but _could_ he? “I’ll try.” It was all he could promise. 

“Spike…”

He knelt, breathing hard to steady himself. He knew he was shaking all over to think of taking this step, but… she was probably right. If they couldn’t get past this, what was the point of any of it? And if he was any kind of man, he should be able to face it, if _she_ could fucking face it! “What do you want me to do?” he whispered.

She held out the bottle of body wash, so of course he automatically turned his hand up to receive the ablution. “I want to feel your hands on me.”

/Bloody fuck./ “Whatever you want,” he repeated, and took the offering. Spread it to both hands, as she turned into the spray to let it rinse her hair, and focused on what he knew he could do, without doubt. Worship her body, with everything he had. And then, maybe, if the moment somehow became right, he could serve her as she seemed to want him to, despite the room, and the past; and somehow they might both find healing. 

She didn’t close her eyes, as he ran his soap-slick palms over her skin; down her arms, round and under. Kept them on him the entire time; and linked her fingers briefly with his in thanks. In encouragement, before releasing him that he might return and run them down, over her breasts. Watched him, breath hitching a little as his palms slid over her nipples; then down, around her back, over her belly, the tops of her thighs; around to the globe of her lovely arse. More soap dispensed, and around her thighs with her breath hitching again at how close his thumbs came to her clit. Smelled arousal—/Fucking God/—and away. Down, behind her knees, and her lifting first one foot and the other. Back up, a kiss to her now-sluiced-off belly, with the faint hint of leftover bitterness from the residue of the soap… and with a deep breath, he slid back with his right hand, brushed her ass slightly, over the bud of her arse. Listened to her breath catch, felt her shudder. And her free hand descended to clench his shoulder, her weight falling a little on him. 

He turned her a little to the water, rinsed his hands so as not to get the harsh soap in her quim. And, as it cascaded around, drew another breath filled with her scent, and slid his left hand in to cleanse her there, where she wanted his touch the most. 

She fell back immediately, against the wall. Into the corner, out of the spray, hands splayed against the tile and just missing the hard knobs of the taps. She was shuddering, bottle of soap dangling forgotten from one hand… And Christ, she was slick for him, swollen and hot; how long had she been…

Her hand found his wrist, and he halted instantly, looked up.

“I need to do you first,” she whispered.

/Oh, bloody hell…/ “I don’t know if I can handle that, luv.”

Her eyes opened on his. “Yes, you can.”

He remembered what he had told her. _‘Anything you want.’_

Christ, he was whipped. “Yeah. Alright.” He backed away. Came to his feet. And trembled all the more when she approached him purposefully, like some kind of compact, stalking lioness, palm already filled with soap… and began to lave him with her small, hot, deceptively powerful hands. Over his shoulders and along the trembling hide of his back. Over his chest and nipples—/Fuck!/—his twitching belly… then up and away from his torso, down along his arms. Flitting away like a sparrow from his grasping hands to slip back around his arse, squeezing playfully. A little tug toward her delectable self, because she was evil, and how the fuck dare she ever call _him_ that, when she… 

Down over his flanks, his thighs; around, just barely brushing his balls, making him shudder with the need to move, and the greater demand to remain still under her attentions. Following the path he had blazed, down his legs; over his lifted feet, one by one, and then up. More soap, and she cupped his balls and waited, fingers lightly juggling them, while he fought with every single ounce of strength he possessed to remain still, clenched every muscle he had and, he thought, some new ones he had invented just for today’s sport, to do for her. Spread his legs a little as she released him finally to move back, both relieved and all the more concerned over his abilities as she brushed over his perineum, as slick fingers slid over the bud of his anus, and fuck, fuck, fuck…

Alright, so he rocked a bit for that, and she won the award for self-control for the night, but she hadn’t had Slayer blood, so bloody fine!

She had her other hand on his cock now, and he somehow stuttered back to life from the shock of it. “No… ah…” He couldn’t find the words. “Same as for you. No soap for…”

“Oh.” Turning them, she shoved him gently under the tap, let the soap wash away… and to his growing desperation, began a slow, thorough handjob under the pouring rain, now turning tepid, as she rinsed under his foreskin. All very functional, sure, but he honestly couldn’t care right now if he was being cleansed or sent through fire. “Buffy…” he managed through clenched teeth.

“What happens if you get soap under there?” she asked curiously, sounding bright and interested.

“Same as if you get it too far up inside your gorgeous cunny, no doubt, damn it, you maddening bird; itches like a fiend, and I might end up with some sort of infection if I wasn’t a vamp, and bloody fuck, are you trying to have me off right now? Because if you don’t stop…”

“Don’t want to stop,” she reminded him quietly… and to his everlasting shock, she lowered herself. Touched him lightly with her tongue… and then hesitated. “Tell me to stop now, William,” she whispered. “We can leave. Go to the bed, or anywhere. But I really want this. If you can.”

He was torn in half. Because if he let her, he knew what would happen. Two seconds or less into having her insanely hot mouth on him and he would have her against the cool tile wall of the shower and to hell with the past, present, future; any of it. The question being, would he be able to live with it. Would _they_ , if he couldn’t.

That was what she was asking him. And she needed his answer now. She was giving him an out. 

Or he could just let it happen. See which way the wind blew. Christ knew he’d like to have other memories in here. Stop the old ones rising, every time he looked inside a bloody bathroom door; or at least have new to combat them. She’d already built lovely ones, here, with him, just now. But would this act confuse the two? If he had her now, in here, would his mind flash back, forever, to her on the floor, and the panicked look in her beloved eyes, and his hands tearing at her robe, and his voice demanding that she let him make her…

He started to wilt, and she halted all movement. “Spike,” she whispered; not with disappointment but with love. “We’re both here, _now_. And I _want_ this.”

/Bloody, Christing fuck./ He wanted it gone. He wanted it sodding _gone;_ as badly as she must, to be doing this. Which meant… “Anything you want,” he told her, and committed himself utterly to the tender mercies of her judgment and care.

She didn’t ask him again if he was sure. She just swallowed him down. And she was doing that fucking unbelievable thing with her tongue that was patently absurd, how fast she could do it; and fuck, the muscles of her mouth were nearly as sodding as strong as the muscles in her cunny, and he was going to…

He pushed her away abruptly, out of words. Had her against the side wall in a trice, somewhere only inches from the taps, and was staring into her eyes, the moment of decision upon them. “Please,” she whispered, for the second time that night. “Make it go away.”

“Oh, fuck,” he whispered, and picked up her leg. Threw it over his hip. She came to him willingly, caught him up… and guided him into her shower-fed warmth. 

“Oh Christfuck Slayer, fucking God Buffy…”

“I love you,” she told him, and her head was buried in his neck, and the spray on his back had gone cold and he could not give one fuck less if it was pinging ice crystals. She was hot and willing all ‘round him, and nothing mattered anymore but the moment. Past, present; none of it but the now, with him buried to the hilt inside the volcanic heat and intensity of her, and him _home_. 

“Now,” she told him, and he realized belatedly that he was still; just breathing, immobile, flush against her. He moved as he was bidden, thrusting without thought… felt her clenching already, all round him, oh bleeding _god_... Heard a sound from somewhere above his head and to the left that slowed him before she could bring him off; something like maybe metal screeching. And the water cut off abruptly, leaving his back prickling, and he would laugh if he could, but he was too far gone; because she had just crushed the showerhead in the throes. 

But she was still cumming, cumming on him, and was tightening up, couldn’t stop, he was going, going; threw his head back as he thrust into the hot fist of her as she crushed him. Welcomed the pain and the astounding pleasure, and laughed and damn near cried as he told her again and again, “Fuck, I love you Buffy, Christ, you’re the One, Fuck…”

It seemed somehow fitting that they broke the tiles. Kill the bathroom, kill the memories. And find their way back to each other.

***  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Been dying to do that scene for AGES. Stupid hell with the stupid non-working bathrooms. Obvs it's been in Buffy's mind for long enough now though that she's worked through it. Spike... clearly never considered they would.  
  
I think she kinda took him by surprise, hehe.  
  
Next post, aftermath. And fresh food. And the things you can do with food. Hee. (There is, I must confess, the hell of a lot of sex at the beginning of this fic. So shoot me. I was enjoying the relaxing return to a chill, non-life-or-death environment, pre-Scoobies/Scourge stress, hehe.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, I negotiated a lull for them in here. Don't get too anxious with me. I figured on their behalf that what would be would be, and a few hours give or take wouldn't change much, what with cross-Atlantic travel, and there were airplane logistics when you were traveling-while-vampire that required a certain level of not flying by the seat of your pants, as it were... Hence, a little more time spent in the ugly apartment canoodling and working out the logistics. And... stuff. Hehe.
> 
> Mostly I was focused on the 'and stuff', but that's because I'm greedy.

Somehow they stumbled out of the shower, her legs still wrapped around him. She blindly snagged his lone towel off of the small shelf as they passed, and he staggered out of the room still inside her; down the short hall to the bed. She threw down the towel rather hastily, though it did them little good save maybe to catch about one-third of the drips from her hair as they crashed down onto the twin mattress. It screeched in protest, and she giggled, clinging to him when he rolled them so that she was on her side, facing him. “I’m sorry I ruined your shower.”

The bedclothes were likely sodden as well, and no doubt the bedframe was something of a disaster. He didn’t give a damn. He’d had the presence of mind to turn the taps off on the way out, by some miracle, but it wasn’t as if he was planning on staying. Nor yet bringing this piece of shite bed with him. “Wolfram and Hart pays the rent on the dive, so it’s no skin off my bloody back.”

“Oh. Well, then we should go back and wreck the rest of the place.”

He buried his face into her shoulder, relief rising in him like a soaring thing and feeling altogether too much like a dove set free from the dark, confusing prison of a magician’s hat. “Already did for quite a bit of that room at least. Fairly sure I’m not like to get the security deposit back.”

She went on giggling in his arms, which was just bloody lovely, and he’d listen to it all day. “You paid a security deposit?” she exclaimed, as if she couldn’t quite feature him doing something so… normal.

“Well,” he admitted blandly, “That’s a bit of a long story. Another bloke did when he set me up here, mostly to mess with Peaches’ head. But when I decided to keep the place I hung about the ponce’s office for two days, tryin’ to convince him to put my rent on the payroll as a sort of stipend for my services. Interrupted his every meeting to haunt him, and told him if he didn’t help me keep the flat I’d just move in there…”

She dissolved against him, lost in mirth, and he grinned at her, caressing the droplets on her shoulder. Bent to lick them off, not entirely certain he had ever felt this good, or this free, throughout the entire run of his long existence. 

They lay like that for he had no idea how long, until he thought maybe she might be drifting off into sleep. Which wouldn’t be all that surprising, he supposed, even with the background stress of knowing what they might soon face. After all, one way or other, they were bound to be a bit late to the show. A plane flight back to Europe wasn't likely to be available on short notice at two-thirty in the morning; and if they _did_ manage to find one with an available seat for her, it wasn't likely to be a direct one to Glasgow or wherever the bloody hell they'd stashed the chits. He'd no idea of the budget Rupert had been able to swing for Buffy's girls after the fact, with his Wankers' Council having bitten it, though he'd heard his girl and her lot had done a bit of... creative fundraising in the interim. Still, no doubt their accumulated monies didn't extend to such things as paying off airlines to acquire sudden, non-stop flights over the Pond.  
  
Likely they'd end up on some sort of stitched-together bit of madness, with him trying to dash from one cargo-hold to another somehow without parboiling, like a bit of luggage left in the midday sun. /We'll be lucky if we can manage Heathrow, and a sodding train up the length of the bloody countryside./ Which would take up too much bleedin' time as well; and all of it meant that either way, he and his gorgeous general of a mate were likely to end up wrong side of the siege, should those Scourge sods choose to come at her headquarters first off. /We'll have to have a plan to sneak in from behind 'em. Or maybe they'll go after Rome first, and we can slip in ahead of 'em up in Scotland./ Though, he knew Buffy was hoping like hell they wouldn't, since no other of her lot had a sodding castle to their name.  
  
Just the thought, by the way, of a great load of Slayers forted up in a damned castle, bristling with the tools of the trade, was enough to give a vamp a bit of pause (and to make a man proud to be even tangentially connected to such an endeavor, as well), and what the bloody hell these idjit Scourge thought they were doing coming after these chits was anyone's guess.  
  
Well... one way or other, he and Buffy were on borrowed time when it came to the journey. Which was the reason his Slayer had long since warned her folk a siege might be coming. They were already prepping. The time zones would account for a bit of kip by this point, and they could dash off to LAX after a couple hours shuteye, find some spot or other to stash him on whatever flight she found to take them over the Pond—hopefully one with only one or two layovers—and be off soon as they were fresh to face yet another sodding battle.  
  
Christ, the idea of going right into another fight sounded exhausting. Like back in that last year in Sunnyhell, when every day had spelled one deadly skirmish after another. It was one thing to know they were technically in bodies that hadn't experienced Hell-A, and that objectively they had only just lived through the one fight, if a particularly grueling one... but it didn't alter one whit the subjective, lived reality of the mind. The closed time-loop may technically have rid their bodies of the stress and sleep-deprivation, the exhaustion that had riddled them over the last month of their stay in Hell-A; war and death and near-starvation and the rest. Still, this night had brought them, long ago though it might seem now, the emotional strain of uncertain reunion, fierce battle, torrential downpour and cold, the loss and returning of their bond, a huge emotional catharsis, and some damn fine sex. Not to mention a long journey for Buffy, which was never helpful for a Slayer, all that sitting still and thinking. That sort of thing tended to send his love into a tizzy, so no sodding wonder if her physical self, at least, was exhausted, between that and the charge that was setting off the powder keg with a damn good fight and then the lovemaking. Which, capping the reunion, in a way, was deserved enough, he supposed, and Christ, time-loops were an oddity and a half. 

/Imagine it had simply gone this way, yeah? What would we be like, now, if we’d just fought the battle, come out the other side fine, come here, done this? Where would we have gone from here, without that time in hell to find each other?/

“I’m sorry we didn’t make it to the bed again,” Buffy murmured, speaking soft into his throat, and described a lazy circle on his neck with two fingers. 

It startled him to hear her voice, considering how slow and quiet her heartbeat had become, and he tilted his head back a little in an attempt to squint at the top of her still-damp head. “Why’s that, pet?”

She sighed a little and lay back, eyes sober on his and all laughter fled. “Because before, when we were together _here_ … I could only be there with you when I wasn’t there. When even you couldn’t see me there. Because I never let you come to mine—not even at the end—and now it’s gone.” Her eyes flickered away, but not before he read the sadness there. The regret. “I would have, you know. If the Potentials weren’t…”

“Buffy.”

“But it was the best I could do to come to _you_ , by then. To try to tell you…”

“You don’t need to do this, Love. I know why…”

“It doesn’t make it any less unfair,” she told him, interrupting his absolution to run her fingers up along his drying arm. “Because I wanted you there. Every time. But it was the only thing I could do to keep it less than real. To keep _you_ less than real.” Her breath hitched a little. “You know, after I beat you up so bad that time, I confessed to Tara, what we were doing. Asked her if it was the spell. The one that brought me back. I kept looking for reasons outside me, for why I wanted you so bad; like there had to be something wrong with me to want to be with you more than I wanted anything else in my life…”

/Oh, bloody hell, Love…/ He wanted to stop her, but he rather thought she was getting at something important, so he shut his damn gob. After all, she had just helped him to let go of something he would ever have thought in a million years he could forgive himself. He owed her this. 

Buffy heaved out a slow, pained breath, her voice cracking. “She asked me… if I loved you. And I couldn’t answer. It caught in my throat. And before I could even sort through everything to figure out what to say she was there, forgiving me. Telling me it was okay if I did, because you’d done so much good, and you loved me so much… but it was okay if I didn’t too, because I was going through so much. And of course I just hated myself so much more when she said it, because was that what I was _doing?_ Just using you? Hearing it flat out like that made it even worse; because I _knew_. I knew that I didn’t deserve you then, whatever I told myself. Because I knew you loved me, and I knew how much good you’d done, and I knew it was because of _me_ , and…”

She was getting too wound up. He had to catch her up, shake her a bit till she met his determined gaze. “Buffy, it doesn’t matter now. None of it does…”

“It does,” she whispered, eyes locked on his. “Because it doesn’t matter now and it didn’t matter then. How I came back. More demon-y or just really messed up in the head. You loved me and I used you, and that was wrong. What I did to you was wrong; especially because…” She shuddered then, trembling in his grasp. “Because I was falling so _hard_ for you and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to because I was so scared that if I did you’d turn cruel and hate me like Angelus did, and I needed you to love me more than I needed _anything_ , so I thought if I just stayed cruel to you you’d never leave me, and how fucked up is that, Spike, that I made _myself_ the monster so that you wouldn’t become something you never would, because you already _were_ the demon, and you _loved_ me…”

He couldn’t. He silenced her with his mouth, because fuck Angelus and the way the bastard had so badly damaged his beautiful love, and how it had fucked them both in the arse for so long. /Why do you still haunt me and break the women I love, even before I have the chance to bleeding love them; even _now_ , after all these years?/ “I understand,” he told her. “You hear me, Buffy? I understand. And just hearing that, just knowing… gives me life. Because it means… you loved me. Just knowing how scared you were to love me makes it all worth it. Because it means… I wasn't mad, what I thought I felt. Even if you didn't want it; even then. And you know what that means?”

Her eyes, still locked deep in the pit of self-loathing, broke free for a moment to catch on his. He held her there, inspired. And smiled, giving her his all. “It means that you thought I was worthy. Soul or no soul, just a demon trying his best; you loved some part of me. That means everything.”

She watched him for a moment… and then sagged against him, defeated. “If I could’ve told you… Shown you somehow; just let you in, even a little…”

He heard the unspoken. What might be different, what could have changed, for them? “We’ll never know, Love. But I wouldn’t change a single second of what we’ve done together since, if it means it’s got us to where we are now. So just rest, yeah? Lay your head here with me, and forget yesterday.”

She settled then, expending a little breath that sounded like, perhaps, relief. “What about tomorrow?” she asked him, though she had, in fact, relaxed a little.

He laid his hands on her back, resumed his light caressing of her drying skin. “Somehow I’m not fussed about tomorrow.” And he kissed the crown of her lovely head.

***

**B:  
  
** You wouldn’t know it was morning, down here, but she would take Spike’s word for it, since, you know, vampire. Buffy thought he could, like, smell the sunrise or something, the way his nostrils flared sometimes when it got close to dawn.

She would’ve thought it was still the dead of night. Could’ve spent another few hours, easy, just snuggled up with him, listening to him do that purring thing, all nuzzled up against her new bite and sending perks of sexy sensation through her body while he did vampy things in his sleep, because sleeping with him was almost like this entirely new thing now they were back in their home dimension.

Spike-the-demon was all wide-awake, here, where he’d been nap-boy back in Hell-A. And sleeping with the wide-awake demon was really, really interesting, just for the record. If she’d thought Spike-mostly-William was snuggly, she hadn’t counted on the whole ‘nesting’ thing. /And how dumb was I, that I used to make him stay away. That I wouldn’t even let him touch me after sex, much less stay with him after?/ Or, she supposed, maybe she’d done it on purpose, subconsciously. Because she had to have known. Had to have realized on some deep level she wouldn’t have wanted to admit to that Spike would have wanted to snuggle her; and even worse, if he had… /I would have had to lie to myself about how much I needed it. Wanted it. And that was just so not acceptable, because we weren’t ‘in a relationship’. Stupid, stupid Buffy…/

Of course, there were cons to being with the incredibly possessively snuggly vampire overnight. One was extricating oneself when it became necessary. For sure getting away from him long enough to pee was, she thought, going to be a daily trial. 

Demon-boy here kind of thought she was his personal, blood-filled, heart-beating teddy bear. 

He purred literally the entire time. And he had more arms and legs than an octopus. And he kind of wrapped around a person like a boa constrictor. It was a little invasive, but at least she’d mostly already gotten used to uber-cuddles over the last few months, so she could deal. Luckily he wasn’t also crazy warm. With a human it would be intolerable; especially back in that oven where they’d been living. Not that summer in California was anything to sneeze at. 

Still. At some point she was probably going to have to punch him off of her to get some space. Damn possessive demon. 

Before she had to do that today, though, he was up and staring around him with the whole flare-y nostrils, ‘Hey! It’s daytime!’ thing happening. Kissed her neck lingeringly, murmured a smooshy “Good morning,” into her bite in a way that made her seriously consider trapping him in the bed for longer… And then, while she was still busy rubbing her sandy eyes and trying to focus her vision on, what? Three and half hours of sleep? He was already up and rummaging around in his stuff; poking through a battered dresser, digging out his clothes from the few items hanging in the otherwise empty closet… basically just rarin’ to get the hell out of there. Not that she was against that, since they, you know, had shit to do and transportation to arrange and all that crap, but...  
  
But on short sleep both objectively and subjectively, and having been on the run—in both realities—essentially for months, she found herself strangely loath to re-enter her previous existence; found herself unexpectedly fighting down the urge to just... put it all off. Which was horrible and irresponsible and un-Buffylike of her, and she needed to get up and make some calls and get her ass in gear. /Coordinate. Be a general. Do adulting. Yadda... oh!/  
  
An idea struck her, very suddenly, which might solve all of their current problems, or at least most of them. She would have to run it by Spike, but if he wanted to roll with it... Granted, he might think of it as begging an unwanted favor, but the way she saw it, the favor was owed to _her—_ if not the both of them _—_ rather than the other way around.

To be fair, Spike might be willing just to get out of town. He seemed totally ready to bail on LA; at least, judging by the way he was leaping into the packing thing. His wardrobe, she noted as he began stripping the place, was as familiar as if he had brought it all from Sunnydale. She thought he must have replicated every outfit as she watched in fascination while he tossed the articles one-by-one onto the foot of the bed. Black tees, check. At least five. Red silk button-downs with long lapels, check. Two. Same in purple, check. One. One in dark blue, check. Excellent. End of shirt selection, and so far her guy was running true to form in Los Angeles. 

Next drawer. Pants. Four pairs of black jeans. Check. Some indeterminate number of black socks for those times when he felt like bothering, since the jerk didn’t sweat. Check. No underwear. Check and check. She was pretty convinced he had never heard of men’s underwear. Not that she was complaining, but… “Don’t vampires chafe?”

He blinked her into focus, arrested in mid-inventory. “What, luv?”

She tried on a smirk of her own and jerked her chin at the pile. “Never seen you wear underwear.”

He rolled his eyes and turned away to go on with his surprisingly neat job of folding and straightening things into piles. It was kind of adorable how bizarrely nitpicky he was being, considering she had always thought him the type who would just throw everything into some crappy, out-of-date suitcase and head for the next city. “If you ever saw the underwear I was forced to wear in my youth, you’d be turned off from that sort of kit for the rest of your days as well.” He shot her a fierce, defensive blue look. “Nor yet the things women had to put up with. Don’t get me started on how long it took to get to anything shag-worthy under all that fucking folderol…”

“I believe you.”

He grunted and vanished out the door. Came back about two seconds later with—yes!—a suitcase that looked like it had last seen service in the 1950s; battered, gray, hard plastic with some sort of leftover pieces of what looked like plaid thread sticking out from under the aluminum framework that held the locks and handle. He slapped it down on the bed, causing her to jerk her feet swiftly out of the way, and began efficiently piling clothes into the thing; _boom, boom, bam_ , done. Stared into it for a second, then turned with a frown and headed out again like he just couldn’t get out of this place fast enough. She heard some rustling noises and a faint clatter. “You want some help?” she called, amused enough by the display at this point to feel fully awake. 

“I’ll do.”

She might as well get dressed and give him a hand; or at least watch. Though, god, it would really suck to put her clothes on without any lotion. She felt like she might crack after all those months in Hell-A and then the shower on top of that without a single ounce of moisturizer… /C’mon; shut up, Buffy. This body never saw Hell-A and you know it./ Still, the principle stood. After that incredibly rough bodywash of his, her skin needed some help. If he didn’t have any here she’d pick some up at the airport, but worth a shot, she supposed. “You have any lotion?”

“Might be some in the loo.”

Rising from the still-damp nest of blankets, she frowned and, in a fit of ‘Dammit, I’ve parented a teen!’ frustration, snatched up the towel and brought it with her. She couldn’t do much about the rest of the bed, but she could at least hang up the worst offender. 

She sauntered into the living room to retrieve her bag from the couch in passing. Spike was, she noted as she entered, sitting on the floor once more, sorting through his CDs. “You’re not going to bring them all?”

He grunted again, too absorbed to even look up and eye her naked form with his usual lascivious intent. “Want to get everything into the one bit of luggage.”

He was being so weird. Was he nervous? “Why don’t you consolidate? Put two in every case or something?”

He brightened at that and started in like some giant twelve-year-old, dissecting cases to remove liner notes and peering at them as if to decide which ones he might want to salvage. She shook her head and headed into the bathroom. While she was in there she could, you know, hang up the towel and hunt for lotions. And, what the hell. Maybe she’d save the shampoo and conditioner. That was some really nice, salon-grade stuff he had in there. No use leaving it for someone to toss out. And he’d want the hair gel, though she was going to make it her personal mission to keep his curls showing as much as possible, gel or no gel.

She wasn’t going to let him know that out loud, but there was going to be a minor, unspoken war going on that front from here on out. /Note to self to try to migrate him over to mousse./ He wouldn’t like it. It didn’t have the same kind of hold… but it would allow her to get her fingers into his hair, work the helmet free with a few quick tugs, soften it up, and presto.

Pleased with her plan to hide or bury all the hair gel from here forward, she resolved to ‘accidentally’ leave the current tub behind. 

After brushing her teeth she shot off a couple of executive texts and went straight to the lotioning, luxuriating in the long-vanished extravagance; and gloried, as she did, in the wonder that was her magically-returned-to-recently-shaved legs. All the shaved things. /Conveniences are just convenient, but they feel… like normalcy./

She came back to an awareness of her surroundings when she felt him at some point, standing behind her. Not outside the bathroom, like he had always done before, but inside the room, thank god, leaning against the wall and watching her intently as she ran the lotion up her smooth calves, one foot at a time braced on the toilet. "You don't present the picture of a bird in a hurry, pet," he observed dryly, as if he hadn't just spent however long screwing around with his music collection.

"I think I have a solution to our problem," she answered shooting for casual, and went on enjoying her toilette. This was, after all, something a little in the way of a test. "I mean, as long as you're not gonna get all vampy and pissy about it."   
  
She felt him go briefly still, then relax into understanding and, she thought, acceptance. _Finally._ "No reason to be, innit?" he answered, easily. "Seems like it'd be the best way. And he'd have no reason to deny us, considerin'."   
  
"I wouldn't think so," she agreed, and reached for more lotion.  
  
Spike shoved the tips of his fingers into his front jeans pockets; almost as if he was using the convenient handle to keep his hands off of her. “Easy to make a bloke forget he’s scared half to death when you’re standing about looking flexible as hell. Cheers.” His voice was steady and calm... but she could hear that faintest note at the back of it that was his own personal brand of self-denigration.  
  
Straightening, Buffy looked over her shoulder, relieved that he was willing to talk about it. She'd been wondering what the hell had been bugging him. “You don’t have to be,” she told him quietly, and lifted her hair. “Will you get my back?”

“Absolutely,” he told her in some sort of fervent tone, and moved closer. Pumped some lotion into his hand and ran the stuff between her shoulder blades, spreading it evenly. “Just don’t want to bung it up, you know? It’s… real, now.”

/You’re beautiful. Stupid and beautiful./ “It wasn’t real when we spent the last four-plus months living together in hell? When we were basically married in Beverly Hills? I thought that worked out pretty well.”

She swore she could feel the _frisson_ run through him, knew the way the shudder attacked his blood from the way it rippled in her own. “It did,” he breathed softly, and his hands never faltered as he went on with his lotion-spreading duties. “It’s just, you know. Through the looking glass.”

“No,” she told him as quietly, and watched him over her shoulder. “Because we already turned the mirror around before we stepped through. And it didn’t switch no matter where we went. This is just who we are now, okay?” Turning firmly, she pressed a hand to his clad chest and met his eyes. And prayed that he could keep up with her through this, because she badly needed him to if she was going to stick the landing. “We’ll figure it out. I believe in us.” 

His held breath left him in a rush. “Christ, you know I do too, Buffy. I’m just not sure I believe in _me_.”

She shrugged and reached out to pump some more lotion into her hands. Ran it down her arms while watching him with frank eyes. “I don’t think you’re going to be the problem. I’ve heard some kind of rumor about this vampire who managed to be all domestic with some other crazy woman for, like, a hundred years, so if that’s true, I should be a snap. If we’re going to worry about anyone in this equation, it should be the one who’s never done this before.” If he was going to show her his insecurity, might as well give back the vulnerability in spades.

Far from turning him tender, her show of self-doubt got him growling. “Oh, shut it, you mad bint. You think I’m gonna let you ruin this and get away from me now…”

“That’s the spirit.” She set the next blob of lotion to work on her breasts and belly, shooting him an approving look as she did so. 

He narrowed his eyes at her. “A challenge is it?”

“Well, we’re both hella competitive, right? So…” She shrugged and pushed a handful of the stuff over her old scar, then up over her left shoulder. The heel of her hand brushed his new mark, and she shuddered with it, saw his nostrils flare in reaction to her unbidden arousal. “I won’t quit if you won’t.” Lifting pointed brows in his direction, she caught a last little bit of lotion in her hands as she twisted the bottle shut, then tossed it to him. “Maybe now I’ve had some practice, I might even be able to do it justice without a bunch of demon women around to show me what I’m doing wrong. So I guess we’ll see who slips up first…” 

“As soon as we get where we’re goin’, luv, I’m gonna shag you senseless.”

She felt the smile curve her lips. /Win./ “Promises, promises,” she told him as she swept up the shower stuff and sidled around him out of the room. 

He followed her like a puppy as she dumped the things into his suitcase. Smirked a little as he thoughtlessly tossed the lotion in after it. “I’m not going to make it so far as the bloody airport if you don’t put some bleedin’ clothes on,” he noted blandly.

/Why do you think I’m not dressed yet, you doof?/ Either way, it was going to be a long damn flight, and at the other end… everything that waited. Dawn and Xander, the Scourge and battle again, the baby Slayers and lines in the sand. Shades of gray, and navigating all of the wavering bits of identity. Giles and giant sisters and just, everything. She felt like maybe they owed it to themselves to cram in as much damn sex as they could manage before then, free and clear. And not only that… time for just the two of them.

Maybe what it boiled down to was she was loath to let their Hell-A honeymoon get away. Maybe she was greedy. “You’re very threatening.” She tried on a thoughtful look. “What do you think the civil penalties are for a hookup in an airport bathr…”

She was flat on her back on the damp bed before she could finish the sentence, which, /Yes!/ with a growling, fierce creature atop her, already showing a little amber-eyed vampage. “I think maybe we should make up for lost time,” she told him, being very literal as she said it. And kicked the suitcase to the ground. They could repack the damn thing. “Will you eat me out, Spike, till you make me scream, and then bite me?” She thought that was a very polite thing to ask. 

CDs clattered everywhere as they cascaded to the ground and he exploded into game face. “I am forever at your service,” he told her very earnestly, and dove for her body.

Lucky thing they no longer had any specific gate-time.

***

At some point, though, she supposed, they had to face the whole idea of moving on with life. Negotiating safe passage. Bidding farewell to LA; home of her childhood and somehow, bizarrely, home again in hell. Leaving behind whatever it had meant to Spike, which, she supposed she ought to ask him at some point, though right now he seemed fully willing to say buhbye to his apartment, at least. So they tore themselves stickily out of the now thoroughly-mangled bed, repacked the suitcase, giggling like children as they did so, replaced a few broken jewel-cases with spares, and she reluctantly went about the business of getting dressed. “I’m mad at myself for leaving my clothes on the bathroom floor,” she informed him, not-quite pouting. “I only have so many anymore, but if I pack them up wet they’ll mold or something before we get back to Europe.” Though, she supposed if she had replaced the outfit once, she could do so again. 

She really, really liked that top. And now that she was nibble-friendly, courtesy of one, it was convenient, too. Offered privacy, but ease of access as well. /Maybe I’ll get more of those. Like, five or six of them in different colors./ She shivered, thinking of all the ways that a stable full of blouses like that could be quietly abused by Spike-fingers while she sat in on interminable Slayer Organization meetings, until she was squirming and breathless and had to drag him off into some quiet stone corridor to have her way with him while she bit her lip to keep from screaming… /And wow. My libido is seriously out of control right now./ But to be fair, as far as her body was concerned she was still in the land of ‘haven’t had Spike—or, really, anyone—except that once, since we broke up two-plus years ago’. And apparently as far as her body was concerned, her hand and a few quiet, miscellaneous accouterments gathered out of desperation over the intervening years had not quite managed to foot the bill. 

/Big fat duh to that./ As if anything—or anyone—could. Obviously there had been a reason she had been losing her mind to get shut of Angel and get back to Spike back in Hell-A, aside from the blood-bond and just plain missing him, and a reason they had spent the better part of their first three months in that dimension screwing like bunnies. They had had a lot of damn time to make up for.

/As far as I’m concerned, we are nowhere near done with that./ Honestly, she kind of hoped it would never wear off. Judging from the way their chemistry had worked before, she had high hopes it wouldn’t. 

“I’ve access to a laundry,” he told her. “Share it with the next bloke over. Ferava demon. Nice enough fellow.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Wonder how he got on during the last few months.”

She couldn’t quite place Ferava demons in the mental rolodex, but apparently they wore washable clothes, which put them firmly in a somewhat humanoid category, and by Spike’s commentary probably in the ‘mostly harmless’ column as well. “Where’s the machine?”

“C’mon, pet.” He led the way, with a quick side-trip to scoop up both their soiled items from the bathroom floor as he went, because he could be damned sweet when he wanted to be. They headed up the stairs, he jerked open the door… And damn near fell backward into her, howling, as his skin started to smoke. “Fuck! Bloody fuck-shite, I forgot!”

“Damn, dammit…” Shoving past him, she leaped at the door and thrust it shut, breathing fast with heart pounding. And stood on the top step, half-hyperventilating still, because how the hell had they _forgotten?_

They were back. Back in the land of the stupid sun that could kill him, and what the hell were they _thinking_ , planning to just march off to go do laundry and head to the airport in the middle of the sunny SoCal morning like nothing was wrong with that idiot concept?

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and caught his hands. They seemed fine. Only slightly scorched. Caught his face next, inspecting it. He let her without pulling away, eyes haunted. 

“It’s fine pet.” And he would be, since she’d given him blood less than a half-hour ago. “I just…” He shook his head, sounding dazed and slightly disgusted. “I can’t bloody believe I forgot.”

She met his gaze, horrified at the near-deadly miscalculation. He had nearly turned to ash again because they were stupid, and she was shaking again at the thought that she could have let him get away from her with such a thoughtless, idiotic… “We got too used to Hell-A. We relaxed too much.”

“We, hell. I’ve been a vamp for a hundred and twenty fucking years, Buffy. Four months and change under the sun’s no bleedin’ excuse for me to act the sodding fool.”

She sighed and released his already-healing face, his at-least-no-longer-smoking hand. “Well, to be fair, you’ve never exactly been the most sane about that particular limitation.” 

He shot her a look that was more than half sneer. “What’re you tryin’ to say, luv?”

“That for someone who liked to accuse me of having a death-wish, you spend a whole lot of your time playing chicken with Mr. Sunshine.” And was it bad that even that reckless quirk of his inspired fond, tolerant amusement in retrospect, rather than sheer rage at his self-immolating idiocy? 

Not right now, of course, since his stupid blasé mentality about the sun had nearly deprived her of his presence… but most of the time. Because it was so _Spike_.

He shrugged and sighed, still cuddling his wet ball of laundry. “That’s about living, pet, not dying.”

“Huh?”

“You spend your life hiding from what scares you, you aren’t really alive.”

God, he was a walking conundrum, her vampire. “Give me that,” she told him irascibly, and grabbed the used clothes from his arms. “And stay out of the damn sun. Now, where’s the machine? And is the soap on it, or do I need to bring it with me?”

Armed with instructions on how to locate his shared appliances, she got their tiny load started, nodding in passing as she returned to what she assumed was Spike’s duplex-mate; a tall, skinny, skeletal demon with faintly gray-yellow skin and six eyes, but the requisite number of limbs to wear standard, humanoid clothing. Though, the ends of them appeared to carry more than the required number of digits. “Friendly Ferava?”

The demon held out a slow hand. “Name’s Gordon. Know you.”

She lifted a brow as she took it, minding as she did the seven or so long, curved claws and trying not to shiver at the hollow, echoing demon-voice. “How’s that?”

“Helped a few friends of mine make it safe to Clover Park.”

/Oh. Damn./ “Right. Um, small world.” She hesitated, wondering at this new notoriety. “Did you, um… fare okay?”

Her hand dropped, and he tightened up. “Got hung up with the armies. Pressed into service. Wasn’t my idea. They caught me deserting.” The thin, velvety-looking skin over the skeletal body shuddered visibly. “Flogged and executed for treason against Burge’s army.”

She had no idea what to say to that. “I’m… really sorry.”

He shook it off with a visible effort. “We’re all back, right?”

/That’s one way to look at it… but will we any of us ever really come back completely?/ “Yeah. I guess so.” She nodded at the washer. “This shouldn’t take long. It isn’t much.” And she did her best to keep her voice soft, wishing as she did so that they could have found and helped more people. /And yes… that includes demons. _Now_ it does./ “You hang in there, Gordon.”

“Thank you, Champion Buffy. I never thought I’d say I wanted to meet a Slayer, but…” He hesitated. “I’m glad.”

All she could do was nod and think, /I’m glad I met you _now_./

***

At a loss for anything better to do till the laundry was done, they ordered in for breakfast. Spike paid, even though Buffy insisted she could cover it, muttering something about using up his “bloody dosh” while he could, Stateside, and “bleeding lawyer-boy allowance, anyhow”, and “feed up my chit before she goes too thin to manage anymore…”

“Manage what, exactly?” she asked him archly as she came back from the door with the coffees and the bag containing the two Styrofoam containers from a nearby breakfast diner. Her stomach rumbled as it caught the odors rising from the pastries and things inside, and she fought back a moan at the realization that she was about to eat fresh food from a fresh stove, out of a _refrigerator_. God, there would be _cheese_. _Cream_ cheese, and _butter_ , and…

“Bloody Christ, get over here Slayer and eat something before you make me mental, standing there smelling the stuff like that. You sound like a bleedin’ freight train.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “You don’t have to be insulting. You got fresh food on tap all through the last few months. I got MREs and crap.” She approached the center of the living room—they had eschewed his crappy green Formica table because it only had the one chair and a carpet picnic sounded a hell of a lot more intimate—and dropped cross-legged before him so their knees touched. Handed him his coffee, which he promptly set aside to watch her, set down her own, the food. And struggled for decorum, because it would look pretty bad, probably, if she just ripped into everything and crammed it all into her mouth without at least some show of patience.

Spike was watching her knowingly. “Go on, pet. Dig in. I’ll enjoy watching you enjoy. Christ knows the little sounds you make when you eat something you love are damn near as hot as the ones you spout off in the shower, or when you’re riding my cock.”

She shot him a glare. “I so don’t…”

“Tell me another one, luv. I seem to recall you having a conversation with a two-week-old cinnamon roll that was mostly moaning.”

She rolled her eyes again, but couldn’t wait anymore. Opened the first carton… and, alright, had to bite back a sound that was _not_ a moan when the full spectrum of aromas wafted up from inside to hit her full in the face. Blintzes. Cream. Cheese. _Blintzes_. With _strawberries_. _And_ raspberries. _Fresh_ ones. Oh _god_.

“That was a nice one, luv. Do it again.”

“Oh, shut up. And for the record, the cinnamon-roll thing was so not my fault…”

“I’m going to fuck you while you eat that.” It was a quiet statement of intent, and something curled up inside of her. Tightened in anticipation. Her breath caught, and for a second her sense of smell whited out. 

“That sounds… distracting,” she managed after a breath or two.

“I’ll let you enjoy the food for a few minutes first. But then I think I’m not gonna be able to keep my hands off of you. Just thought you ought to know.” He was being so damn _conversational_ about it.

She could breathe. Definitely. It was just… “Any particular reason?” she asked, doing her best to stay just as casual as he seemed to be.

He smirked at her, rolling his tongue. Flicked it a little behind his teeth, in a teasing tattoo that made her brain short-circuit a little because now he had it working at complete cross-purposes. /Food. Sex. Food. Sex. Guh./ 

“Want you to know how unbelievably good it feels,” he told her, and slid his cupped hand up along her arm, making her shiver, “to get off while you’re tasting the best thing you can think of. And since right now, with hunger as your sauce, you’re best disposed to know, I figure it’s my chance to show you…” His hand slipped off her arm. Reaching out, he cupped her ass and tugged her just a little closer, so the cartons of food were wedged tight in between them, the residual heat leaching out of the containers to warm her in… places. “…Exactly how that feels,” he concluded, and nodded at the top container. “Go on, luv. Eat up.”

She found herself nodding back like some kind of bobblehead in the back window of a lowrider, and fumbled for one of the plastic forks floating around somewhere in the bottom of the bag. Couldn’t find one. Huffed in frustrated confusion… and looked up gratefully when Spike held one out to her. “Thanks.” 

“My pleasure.” His eyes were glowing at her completely unfairly in that way that left exactly zero doubt as to his double entendre.

/Just keep breathing/ she reminded herself, and leaned over with fork poised to dig in. /Blintzes. Hot, yummy blintzes with cream cheese and fresh fruit and…/ She sawed a piece off of the creamy, fruit-drizzled crepe, lifted it to her mouth… And, okay, she did moan as it passed her lips. It was still warm. Deliciously fresh. It exploded onto her tongue, smooth and rich and spreading everywhere into her senses; to the back of her throat, up into her nose, hitting every taste bud, and oh god, she had forgotten how _good_ food could be! 

And then Spike’s cool fingers were there; sliding up and down her back, under her shirt, as if he were encouraging her. She arched automatically into the caress, feeling like a cat being petted, and shivered at his touch while the bite slid sensuously down her throat. Shuddered. Stilled for a moment, fairly sure that this was going to be some kind of major test of her ability not to completely fly apart or something.

“Go on, luv,” he murmured, and she moved to cut off another bite. Brought it to her lips. It was damn near as good as the first, and she forgot Spike for a moment in the throes. Till his thumb brushed over her nipple. 

She managed to swallow, somehow, before her breath exploded out, and shit, he was trying to kill her. “Dammit, Spike!”

“Have some coffee, luv. Know you missed it.” He sipped at his own in passing, looking for all the world completely innocent.

She pinned him with her best Slayer glare, feeling slightly trapped. “You’re a bastard.”

“No,” he answered blandly, and set his Styrofoam cup back down with a grin. “Know exactly who me parents were, ta all the same.” He nudged the top container pointedly toward her. “Eat, luv. You’re starving.”

“You’re not exactly making it easy to concentrate on food.” 

His grin widened, and he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, as if disapproving of her mettle. “Try harder. As the senior Slayer, you’re supposed to be possessed of divine focus, supreme mental discipline and all that rot. Tune out the noise of demons and get on with the job at hand…”

She scoffed at him and turned back to the blintz. “You sound like Giles.” That accusation would set him back for a minute, at least.

“Oi!” he exclaimed, looking thoroughly outraged. “You take that back, you offensive chit!”

/Predictability, thy name is Spike./ “No.” It felt damn good to have the upper hand back, and she reapplied herself to her blintz with good humor. God, it was nice to focus solely on the flavor of the cheese and the fruit and the freshness and the…

Her lover watched her eat for a long moment, narrow-eyed and flared of nostril, clearly trying to figure out exactly where he’d gone wrong. She made it through the blintz in short order, scraped up every single ounce of extraneous cheese and sauce—god, that was good—and set aside that carton. Had a sip of coffee. Moved to open the next one, because she was still damned hungry. /Oh _hell_ yes. Spinach and mushroom omelet for one, heavy on the mozzarella. A little touch of hollandaise drizzled on top…/ All the eggs had finally gone bad in Hell-A after the first month. She wasn’t even going to get started on the produce. Her body might not be the same body that had gone through all that, but her mind still remembered how it felt to be literally _screaming_ for the vitamins. 

The first bite of the omelet was almost as amazing as the blintz was. Rich and savory and full of flavor, not moist or too dry but just right, perfectly-spiced, and give credit where it was due, Spike really knew his food places. Damn vampire. God, she could really slaughter a restaurant right now…

“Just keep making that noise, pet.” His voice had gone throaty again, fingers once more tickling lightly on her tailbone where her jeans rode down low, and damn, she had forgotten not to encourage him. 

She ignored him to take another bite, throttled back any noises… but she couldn’t help the way her eyes rolled back in her head, because they had put _bacon_ in the omelet. Bacon!

Cool fingers slid around the front of her waistband, and she would have spared a second to slap them away, but she was too busy stabbing up her next bite. Bacon bacon bacon, glorious bacon…

She was just really getting into the hollandaise, which was honestly spectacular, when the button gave way on her jeans, and his fingers slid inside of her pants. And whatever. She didn’t care anymore, because the hollandaise and the bacon were doing this thing in her mouth with the portobellos and the egg, and she was…

His fingers found her, and what the hell. She rocked back, gasping and pushing up against him as he fingered her. “Christ yeah, pet, come on…”

“Fuck,” she heard herself whisper. 

“No, come here…” She heard something that maybe was the sound of containers being moved, and then another forkful of omelet was being thrust into her mouth. She took it blindly… and then she was being pulled onto his shoulder. Mouth and nose full of the taste and the smell and the flavor of the food, invading everything that wasn’t already being invaded by his oh-so-skilled hands, she couldn’t help it anymore. She clambered on to straddle him as his fingers went on relentlessly driving her, and god, oh god, oh god…

After a second or two, she couldn’t taste the food anymore. But she didn’t notice, because she wasn’t moving anything anyway, except to jerk a little with the aftershocks, caught on his fingers like a worm on a hook while she trembled and clung, and holy fuck.

“Bloody hell, luv, we should do that every meal.” He sounded reverent.

She must have swallowed at some point in there. Her mouth was clear enough to bite down on his shoulder, and she did so, filling her senses with the taste of Spike. He shuddered beneath her, his unoccupied fingers clenching hard at the small of her back. “Bloody fuck…”

“I’d never finish eating,” she whispered, eventually releasing him. “I thought you had some kind of goal.”

“Yeah,” he admitted, maybe ruefully. “I lost sight of it for a mo’. But in my defense, you have to go around sounding like pornography while you do it…”

She dug her nails into his shoulder blades as another aftershock hit, pressed down hard on his hand. “Not… nnn… my fault. _God_.” 

“You can finish eating unmolested now,” he informed her solemnly, and turned his head to kiss what he could reach, which happened to be something in the general vicinity of his bite. Not convincing. 

“Not sure I’m hungry anymore. At least for food…” Her hands slipped down between them, hunting for his belt.

He caught them, put her firmly away from him. “Finish the meal, pet, before it gets cold.”

She pouted at him, completely incomplete. “You started this!”

He grinned easily. “We can finish it after.” He pointed stubbornly with his chin. “Good coffee, yeah?” And releasing her right hand, he picked up his own cup with his left and raised it to her in a little toast. The smell of sex wafted off of his fingers, which, again, not convincing. Took a showy sip. “Top of the morning and all that shite.”

“You are the most frustrating guy in the entire universe,” she informed him, half-irate and half-resigned, and slid down off of his lap with a thump that jarred every now-very-awake part of her. The impact made it clear that said parts hovered somewhere between kind of satisfied and also kind of ‘is that all?’.

“Reason you love me?” Spike asked, sounding hopeful.

“Reason I want to pin you down and screw your brains out,” she amended, frowning, and dragged the stupid omelet back to her lap. “I love you because of about a million other things. This…” She sighed and poked at the thing, aware that five minutes ago she had wanted to eat it more than she’d wanted to live. 

Now she wanted to eat her vampire. Who was playing all hard to get. Dumbass. /Grr./ She shoved another bite in her mouth... and sighed, relaxing, because, okay; it still tasted really good.

Spike just sipped his coffee and watched her, smirking over what had been said. But the light in his eyes, the gentle edges to the smile? Those were for the things she hadn’t.

***  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
I promise, they **are** actually going to Europe. At this point it's all of maybe 7am after they probably got in at around one or something (the battle would have started around ten or eleven, considering sunset in May-June in LA is approx 8pm, and sunrise is approx 5:45 around then in LA). So I'm excused, right?  
  
Idc. I make no excuses. :-D


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For some reason I just really adore this chapter. It makes me smile in a lot of ways. One of 'em is that there're details in it that are my love-letter to SoCal culture. Another is just... I dunno. There's a feeling of closure in it for both Buffy and Spike, emotionally. And... *shrugs*
> 
> It just feels good to me.  
> Anyway. Hope y'all enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

“Is that everything?”

“No.” She could hear him rummaging around in the bathroom from where she stood next to the now very-sex-smelling couch, trying to close the hard, plastic suitcase around the addition of his random kitchen articles. “Got to bring the Burba-weed,” he’d told her a few minutes ago, while poking around the counter in there.

/But…/ “Isn’t that something you mostly just mixed in with the stuff you drank from the fridge?” she’d interrupted, confused. And she was just now, in retrospect, getting why a vampire would need so many additives for blood, if he were drinking a diet made up of something that tasted like hell to him. Weird cereals, and whiskey, and this burba stuff… 

Anything to make the animal blood palatable. “You’re never drinking pig again, so…”

“Stuff’s ruddy expensive, luv. Never know when it might come in handy. Could sell it again, or it might be needful for something witchy at some point. Never know…”

Well. At least he wasn’t going to start getting all martyr-y about the blood thing now they were back home. Though… They were going to have to figure out how to manage his diet here. Which was going to be… complicated. Everyone in Hell-A had obviously been in the know about the existence of demons. They’d been living in hell, had just been glad just to meet a demon who had been willing to ask first before nibbling. Which… /God. What are we gonna do about that whole widespread knowledge thing?/

/I guess hopefully we pray they all write it off as a mass-hallucination brought on by PTSD or something?/ 

If not, the world was about to end up pretty different. 

/Maybe problem for another time?/ 

Definitely problem for greater minds than Buffy Summers’. 

She’d bring it up to Giles when they got back to Europe. The right-now problem was, no one here—at least, no one outside of LA, anyway—was likely to just up and volunteer to feed her guy, which… /I can’t stay in LA for just that reason…/ Not that either of them _wanted_ to stay, even if she didn’t have other responsibilities. There were reasons for that. But… _dammit_. /We’re probably going to have to, like, dip into the stupid suckhouse economy or something, aren’t we./ The thought made her want to punch something, even though she knew it really shouldn’t bother her the way it did.   
  
It definitely wasn’t about trust. She trusted Spike both when it came to _how_ he did it—obviously, since he had done it in front of her, often and on the regular, in hell—and to be safe while doing so. She didn’t even think it was a leftover Riley thing, or it would’ve bugged her more that the donors in Hell-A had gotten off on Spike biting them. 

It really was more that… It just seemed… degrading to her vampire, to have to… stoop so low, or something.

“Dunno when I’ll get more,” Spike was saying, still muttering about the stupid plant. “Oh, and that one bottle, pet, since it isn’t opened. Bleedin’ shame to leave the other, but they’ll no doubt bin it if they search the thing, as it’s open…”

“Are you going to bring your whole pantry?” she asked, amused enough to put aside, for the moment, questions of diet.  
  
She got a gimlet glare in return. “Mind you leave space off to the side there, luv. I wanna try to fit in that carton of Morleys.”

“If you try, they’re gonna end up smashed.” She grinned at her unrepentant hoarder of a vamp. Who knew? She had always kind of pictured him as a travel light sort of guy; just pick up and go. But now she had no idea where she had gotten that idea. Obviously it was a total illusion, considering all the crap he had had in his crypt that he’d obviously dragged around with him all over hell and back for a century. And jeez; look how quickly he had accumulated stuff to feather the nest in Beverly Hills! /You always did want to settle down somewhere and stay, didn’t you?/ 

She knew that yearning. She, too, had lost her home and every memory in it. /We’ll make a place. And then… we’ll keep it. You and me; and Dawn, till we can get her back to school. Okay, Spike? We’ll figure it out./ “You know this isn’t Hell-A, right? We can get more cigarettes at the airport. Or when we land.”

She was answered by mutters. And found herself unsurprised to watch him lovingly wrap the whole carton of Morleys in one of his shirts before depositing it safely between the clothes, well away from the bottle of Scotch. 

Now, in his final sweep of the bland apartment, she could hear him dinking around in the bathroom as he rummaged through some cupboard or another. Too curious for her own good, she wandered in after him. Found him pulling out (of course) several bottles of black nail-polish. “Oh. Is that where you hid it.”

He grunted and poked at them in his hand. Prized out two, tossed two others unceremoniously into the bathroom trash can. “Those are almost empty.” He turned to her, looking something between sad and slightly embarrassed. “I don’t have a pencil here...” he went on, tentatively, and trailed off.

She lifted a brow, slightly surprised but willing. “You want me to do your eyes?”

He shrugged with one shoulder, managing to look both defensive and belligerent while cradling his tiny bottles of nail-polish, and he was just the damn cutest sometimes. “Okay, c’mon. I might have one in my bag.” Stupid time-loop displacement crap. She’d been carrying one for him all through Hell-A, in case of a battle jumping off at any moment. He’d always had one in his pocket there, too, next to his at-that-point dead Zippo. Both of them had been pretty much worn to stubs by then, but they were still vaguely usable. 

Gone now, though. 

He followed her out to the living room and dumped his final gleanings onto the couch as he sat. Watched hopefully as she went through her bag, poking into her meager travel-case of makeup. /I should do mine/ she thought, realizing with surprise that she actually could, here. It had been the hell of a long time since she’d had any makeup, though once in a blue moon she’d joined her love in wearing the eyeliner, because why the hell not. “Oh! Bingo.”

He relaxed visibly. “You’re brilliant.”

She turned back to him with the pencil in hand, a little startled at his vehemence. “You know we’re not going into battle, right?”

“Says you,” he grumbled, and his voice showed uncertainty around the edges, beneath a heavy blanket of fiercely self-protective bravado. 

/Okay, well… I suppose, from your perspective./ “What, seeing Xander?”

He snorted. “I could give a toss about that git’s opinion.”

She wasn’t entirely sure about that, but let it pass. “Who then? Dawn?”

He didn’t answer immediately.

/Oh, man…/ “Why is seeing Dawn a battle, Spike?” she asked softly.

He just shook his head and assumed the position, expression going carefully blank and body stilling. When he had her do this, he didn’t even breathe. It was bizarre to put makeup on a living statue, but she’d gotten used to it. Made it easier, if unnerving. 

“Spike?” she asked softly as she uncapped the pencil. 

Silence.

_“Is_ it a battle?”

He let out a breath as the pencil touched his eyelid, all exasperation and thinly-veiled fear. “You don’t know the half of it, luv.”

Okay, she supposed she maybe could understand that, since the way he had left things with her little sister had been kind of… ambivalent. But. “There’s a lot about Dawn… About how she’s been since you… left us… that you don’t know. I think you might be kind of underestimating how glad she’s going to be to see you.”

“Yeah, well. We’ll see.”

She let it go for now, eyes flickering briefly away from the job to take him in. He had his full attire back, and she just didn’t get it. “Out of curiosity… why do you need this anymore? I thought it was because you didn’t have the duster in Hell-A.”

Another silence, then, “Got a bit used to this again.” A strange expression twisted his face, as if he were afraid to admit something, then… “And this part, with you helping…” He halted abruptly, trailing off into what she now knew full well was the beginnings of his personal brand of mortification. 

She scanned his face, alarmed at the uptick of adrenaline she felt in the bond. The alarm. “Spike?”

“Nothing. It’s stupid.”

Okay, now she _needed_ to know. “What? Tell me.” Impatient, she used not her Slayer tone, but the quiet, intimate one that demanded honesty between them, and would brook no omissions.

He sighed heavily. “I’m a bloody nancy fool, is what.”

“Alright?” She waited. 

“Sodding hell, Buffy, are you trying to tear me apart? I’ve got nothing left but these last few shreds of my reputation, and…”

“That’s shot all to hell when it comes to me, because I _know_ you. So tell me, William.”

“Bleeding fuck.” He bit his lip. “In the stories… The ones I grew up hearin’… The ones me mum used to read to me when I was a lad… The knight…” He closed up, pulling abruptly away from the pencil and shuttering his lids; so fast she almost ran a black line down the bridge of his nose. “Just don’t make me tell you, Slayer, or I’ll have to stake meself.”

She heaved a sigh and made to cap the utensil. His hand flew out, caught her wrist, and he groaned, because they both knew the job was half-done, at best. “You’re a cruel woman.” 

“I want to know you,” she whispered.

“Fuck.”

“I won’t laugh.”

“You bloody well should,” he answered viciously, and threw his hands away from himself, eyes jerking away so that he was staring not at her but at the far wall. “The fucking knight always came to his lady before a fight, yeah? And she gave him a favor, to show what he was fighting for. Girded his loins for battle. Which meant to get him all set up for the bloody thing; tightened his belt and all that rot, made sure he was set in his armor. Tucked the favor in and set him on his right road. And you do that, every time, so’s I don’t forget m’self and what I’m about, and I stay on my right road, and I…” His face twisted with a combination of old, leftover uncertainty and mortification. “Fuck, Buffy, don’t make me ever tell you again what a romantic twat I am, or I swear to God I’ll dust meself right then and there.”

She leaned forward to kiss him; partially to shut him up because she hated it when he got so self-denigrating, and partly because she never wanted him to say anything about dusting himself again. It made her heart fall to her feet even to think of it. And also… she got it. She hadn’t realized that he was so newly anxious, with the demon resurgent in him; that he wouldn’t know how to do this right without her around to ‘set him on his right road’. But she understood it, that fear. Considering their past together… He had never worried about it before the soul, had faced every challenge with blithe confidence… but that had been before he had fallen so spectacularly, that one awful night.

Now, even with a year-plus of experience carrying said soul, everything was new. He had been remade yet again, an entirely new kind of entity. He carried soul and demon side-by-side, and no knowing which would be ascendant at any moment. And they were home. His demon was wide-awake once more the way it hadn't been in hell. He was in full possession of all the parts of himself. It must be an entirely confusing state to navigate; to be this new being, all the time. She could only imagine.

Still… She hadn’t realized it had so knocked him for a loop. He was always so good at brazening things through, pretending nothing had changed; at facing the world on nothing but jet fumes and bravado. It explained a lot, though. No wonder he’d been so all over the damn place last night. /I didn’t know you still don’t believe in yourself the way I do./ It also begged the question... /Will you still feel this way only once in a while, or will it be a long-term thing for you to get used to it?/  
  
She could see it being a little bit of a struggle, this mental rollercoaster of his, thinking he had to 'find the right road’; whether as she might see it, or as he saw it now, for himself. /It's just another adjustment, Spike. You'll see. You'll be fine, like you always are./

It made sense, though, that he would briefly falter before he rallied and carried on, as he ever did. He’d spent much more of his life picking his way by trial and error, or simply by thumbing his nose at human custom and proscription, than he had at trying to figure out what was actually ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in all that morass of culture and belief. Things had been straightforward and simple in Hell-A, but they were bound to get confusing again in their own dimension. Complicated. If he felt he needed reminders, still, from her point of view, of what he should be doing in any given moment in order for them to 'work' out here in the real world and with his demon resurgent to push and pull against the soul, then she would give him that, until he felt steady on his feet again.

Pulling lightly away from his lips, she patted his cheek in a little bracing gesture; because, also? It was just adorable how much of a complete squishy marshmallow her guy was under the brittle, defensive exterior. /Spike on the outside, total William on the inside, and how did I never _know_ that before?/

He seemed stunned by her response. He had answered the kiss almost the way he had done when she’d rewarded him with the guerdon in his crypt after Glory had pummeled the snot out of him. “Buffy…”

“You’re a dope,” she told him quietly, and leaned in to continue with her interrupted eye-lining project. “And I love you.”

She felt him trembling the entire rest of the time she spent finishing up his eyes, but she never commented on it. And then, catching his hand, she brought him with her to the bathroom while she put on her own war paint, luxuriating in the sheer joy of being able to apply the light blush, the slight coat of lipstick, the gentle brushing-on of eye-shadow. The simple, girlish mystique of it, and the womanly feeling of contouring. The art form of it all.

It would give him time to recover, watching. 

It worked, and by about halfway through he was providing interested commentary. “You don’t bloody need a spec of it, but sodding hell if you don’t know what you’re doing, Slayer.”

“That’s the hope.”

A pause, then, “What are _you_ suiting up for, then?”

She smiled into the mirror. “Why does it have to be for anything? Sometimes a woman just likes to feel all womanly.”

He scoffed dismissively. “You do that by kicking everyone’s ass.”

That aside deepened her grin. “True.” She opened her mouth in the universal ‘somehow it makes my eyes wider’ face. “Actually, you got me to thinking, and, aside from the fact that I missed wearing it the last couple months…” She slipped the latest brush back into the bag and contemplated a little mascara. “If I’m going to face him down one last time…” Was it bad that she kind of wanted to make a point and really make it stick? 

She shrugged into the mirror. “You wanna return the favor? Do the mascara?” Considering the lack of workable mirrors in the vampire world, she had very few doubts it would be the first time he’d acted as assistant in this particular arena. Of course, she doubted he’d take her up on it, but what the hell. Way to show comfort with his past and no hard feelings, et cetera.

As she predicted, he snorted derisively. “I’d just fuck it up. Appreciate the trust, though.”

There was a conversational lull as she lengthened her eyelashes before he stepped in, his voice questioning, a little uncertain. “This for the poof, then?”

She made a face. Capped the bottle and put it away. “No,” she answered decisively, and firmly closed the case. Dropped it back in her backpack and faced him. “This is for me.” Smiled full into his eyes. “You ready to go?”

“Yeah.” He straightened from his lean and uncrossed his arms. “Off we go, then?”

She nodded, approaching him. “How do I look?”

His lips turned up in appreciation. “Like a warrior.”

“You’re damn right.”

***

The sunlight had finally moved on from the sunken stoop, and they were able to make their skulking way from the apartment. Buffy was surprised when Spike didn't bend to lift the tiny sewer grate between the two doors, leading her instead under the shadows of corner-store awnings to the north... toward a yawning stair in the sidewalk. “We’re taking the subway?” she exclaimed, startled.

“Well,” he shrugged, “someone’s got to. Half the people live here don’t know the bloody thing exists, but if no one uses it, they’ll send it out of commission. Don’t know about you, but I wanna keep it running, if only for blokes like me.” A tight smile touched the corners of his lips. “Could take the sewer superhighway from the flat, but somehow I figured it wouldn’t be your preferred mode of travel, could we avoid it.”

She’d been aware that LA had a rudimentary subway—watching ‘Speed’ had taught her that, even if being a former Angelino hadn’t—a kind of optimistic early nineties project that hadn’t gone far, and only connected some parts of Downtown to a few strategic points and to some distant commuter areas, like the Inland Empire to the east. It wasn’t all that efficient as public transport went, in that it didn’t cover nearly enough of the city to be useful to the average denizen (hence the convoluted network of buses and things). But if it actually went where you were going and you wanted to bother figuring it out, she supposed it was handy enough. “How close does it get us to Wolfram and Hart?” 

He shrugged, looking distant. “Close enough. Luckily we’re on the only line that’s underground. Still have to use the tunnels for the last couple blocks, though.” He shot her an apologetic glance. “Sorry about that, luv.”

She returned the look with a philosophical twist to her half-smile. “What’s a visit to a city without a trip to the sewers to make it complete?” She glanced down at her shoes. “After all, we did it on the way out. Might as well close the circle.” It wasn’t as if being in sewers wasn’t par for the course for her. She’d gotten over it long ago. 

She was kind of amazed when she watched him, of all things, go to the automated booth deal and buy tickets. _Buy. Tickets_. Maybe he was doing it for show, for her sake, or maybe that was just how he rolled these days, because for some reason she couldn’t quite imagine him bothering back in the day. Stealing a ride without paying the fare, definitely. Demon-style, because breaking the rules had been all he was about for most of his existence. Paying for a ticket that most likely would never get checked unless the odds were really off that day… not so much. 

He turned back to her and handed her hers. Frowned at the startled look in her eyes when she took it. “The thing’s losing money, Buffy. I told you. Want them to keep it running.”

“Oh.” /Interesting. It’s for a good cause, then?/

He avoided her eyes for a while after that while they waited, holding tight to the gray suitcase that contained all his remaining worldly possessions and watching with one eye for the train. She, though, watched him. “Are you going to miss LA?” she asked finally, thoughtfully, because what the hell was with him being, like, all civic-minded all the sudden? 

He actually seemed to, you know, care about this town. It was weirding her out.

His head jerked back, and he stared at her in, she thought, amazement. “Bloody hell no! Can’t get out of here fast enough, pet! I hate this bleeding city.”

“Oh. Okay.” She tilted her head a little to watch him some more, trying to figure him out. He just seemed so… vibrate-y. Full of tension. “So… is that why you’re Mr. Ball of Tension all the sudden? Because I hate to think I didn’t do my job back there. I mean, we’ve definitely had plenty of sex in the last…” She frowned, counting. “I mean, five times in, what? It hasn’t even been twelve hours. That’s got to be a pretty decent record, even for us.”

“Not a fan of taking you on a subway, luv,” he answered, short and clipped. “Want to get it over with.”

“But wh…” /Oh./ He’d killed a Slayer on a subway. /Right. Duh./ Sometimes he was such a dork, though. /That was another life, Spike. Part of you, yeah… but not a part of _us_./ “Hey.” She caught his hand. Folded her fingers through his. “We can just walk.” His eyes jerked back to hers, clouded to almost-gray. “It’s not like I haven’t done the sewer thing before, you know.”

He let out an exasperated breath and rolled his eyes at her. “No, I’ll do. Just don’t like it.”

The stubborn idiot stuck to it, too. Kept her hand, marched firmly onto the train beside her when it came, hefting the aging suitcase as he did and planting it firmly between his knees as he took his seat on the hard, plastic bench. Tugged her down next to him on the ugly maroon vinyl when she stood too long surveying him, expression defiant and set. /Okay, fine. You dope./ 

She really loved him. And she wanted to do something to help. Run her fingers through his hair to steady him; something. But he wouldn’t take it well right now. So she just sat beside him and made do with the simple expedient of keeping contact with his body via the press of her shoulder to his arm. 

He vibrated with tension all the way to the next station. They got off there—talk about a short ride—and tromped off down onto the tracks the minute no one was looking. He obviously knew exactly where he was going, eyes alert as he led the way to an opening she thought must be the equivalent of a half a block, maybe, away from the platform. They slipped into the yawning, dark arch, past a broken grate, and were in the main city conduit system. Wires ran all around them. Electrical grid, then. Getting smaller. They’d be crawling soon, if they didn’t find…

“Down we go, pet.” She heard the sound of a grate being pulled up, smelled the familiar, uninviting scent of stormwater and filth and garbage and general unpleasantness. 

/Hello sewer my old friend…/

She found the ladder with one fumbling hand and started down, axe now held free in her grip where it had once been carefully concealed beneath a casually-held jacket. She knew Spike, behind her, also had his choicest sword held free of the duster by this point, though how he was planning on employing it with his hands full of suitcase, she wasn’t entirely sure. She supposed if the situation called for it he’d just fling the case away and pick it up later. 

/This is why I’ve gravitated back to backpacks./ 

Interestingly, though by the way his nostrils repeatedly flared the sewer had seen a lot of recent traffic, they ran across exactly zero local denizens, and had an extremely uneventful trip. Read, boring. It almost made her want to hunt something down and get into a fight just for a nice adrenaline rush to cap off the day before they had to sit still for another sixteen monotonous hours, plus probably a layover somewhere to refuel. But considering she might end up inadvertently picking a fight with some inoffensive someone they’d probably saved in that other dimension, it seemed inadvisable to run off half-cocked right now just because she was probably a little bit of an adrenaline junkie after months of being stuck in hell.

Moving a little ahead of her left side in the dark, Spike made a knowing sort of noise. “Another reason to get out of this city. No idea who to tussle with anymore. Everyone seems like they might be a mate, yeah?”

Could he always read her damn mind? “That’s really irritating, you know. Go get your own thoughts.”

Wry amusement filled his voice. “Those _are_ my thoughts, pet.”

Oh. He was thinking the same thing as her. Well. Who knew? “That’s… maybe creepier?”

His chuckle enveloped her all the way till they found the exit he wanted. 

They stepped through a heavy, steel door into a long, echoing, empty concrete corridor that felt all bomb-shelter-y. She thought she recognized it as similar to the one they’d used to escape from the bottom of Wolfram and Hart to head out to the Hyperion after the battle with Burge and Company. If so, this was going to empty out into the bowels of the building, and they’d have a long trek up to the upper floors where Angel had his offices, but she supposed they might be able to shorten that up now that there were things like working elevators and… “Hold up, luv.” Spike had screeched to a halt in front of her, was holding up one hand, every inch of him tense. “This isn’t right.”

She blinked at the next steel doorway blocking their path, feeling slightly blinded. “Why is it so bright? What are they even _doing_ down there?”

“Buffy… that’s sunlight. I can smell it.”

Putting aside how weird it was that anyone could actually _smell_ sunlight, why the hell would the sun be getting all the way down into the basement of a building that size? Just… What?

“Something’s been right bollixed up, pet. I don’t think there’s a building on the other side of that door.”

/What… How…/ “How does that even make sense?”

He jerked his chin at the knob. “I stand behind it, you open it up. We find out for sure?”

She glared at him, immediately incensed. “Big pile of dust. No.”

“I’ll be behind a bloody plate of steel. Safe as houses.”

“And I don’t care how embarrassed you were earlier, I’m not going to dust you because you’re curious about a line of stupid sun under a door. We’ll find another way to figure it out!”

His face set into hard lines. “Bit below the belt, luv.”

Okay, maybe she’d stepped in it there, but he scared the shit out of her every time he even remotely got close to the subject of him, and fire, and ashes. It almost gave her a panic attack even thinking of him in flames again. “I’m sorry,” she managed, and if it still came out with a bite to it, she couldn’t help it. “It gives me the wig to think of you on fire. I fall apart.”

He let out a breath and rubbed a hand through his newly-gelled hair, slightly disordering it. Over his face, resetting himself. “Yeah, alright. Let’s go back. I know a manhole maybe half a block back. You can poke your head out, have a look?”

She managed to tone it down to a soft note of gratitude. “Thank you.” Mr. Fools-Rush-In, reining it in for her sake. She appreciated it.

They headed back, found the aforementioned exit. He gave her a wholly-unnecessary boost halfway up the ladder—probably as much to get his hands on her ass as because he was trying to apologize for snapping at her—then moved away out of the range of whatever light might escape when she shoved the cover aside. She waited, listening for traffic. The cars seemed to be passing sort of off to her left, so she took the chance and popped the cover up. And took a sec to adjust to the blinding, incandescent light of broad, yellow daylight. 

Holy wow. She hadn’t been in this spectrum of light in months. She had forgotten how _bright_ it was! No wonder it could set a vamp on fire where that dull, filtered, rusty stuff couldn’t back in Hell-A. While she waited to be not-blind, she listened to the cars whooshing along just behind her head—unnerving after months of hearing exactly zero traffic—and damn was it _noisy_. The world was filled with sounds of pedestrians talking to each other, radios pumping out Hip-Hop and Mariachi and Mexican Pop and Talk Radio, like everyone was super-grateful to have their power back and Los Angeles was determinedly ignoring the events of the last few months. A smattering of fast-talking Spanglish DJ swooped past her ear, followed by a snippet of some radio show about football training camps coming up. “…All know the Raiders fell to 4-12 last year. Definitely gonna be Bill Callahan’s last year as head coach. Rumors are already picking up that the man, Al Davis, is already looking Norv Turner’s way…” The words faded, to be replaced by Kelly Clarkson’s melodic voice singing about breaking away, and just, wow. It felt so bizarre to be back. And also, hearing all this was really making Buffy feel nostalgic for home, and kind of making her feel super sad to think of leaving, heading back to Europe. 

Her eyes adjusted to the light, finally, and she turned in place to scan the intersection. Building on one corner; some kind of medical complex. Trees, screening the sign so she couldn’t see what it was. Building on another corner. Boutique shopping, she thought. High-end. Turn. Building on the third. Parking garage. Big one. Turn. Fourth corner…

Big fat nothing. A blank space. Some trees and… a hole. A huge, massive hole in the ground. Like some giant hand had reached down and just plucked the Wolfram and Hart complex right up out of there like uprooting a mountain or yanking a rotten tooth, and spirited it off. 

It was gone, leaving a vast gap in the cityscape.

Not that that was a bad thing, but just wow.

She clambered back down the ladder, awed. “Not so much with the lawyerville.”

“Still bombed?” Spike sounded pretty damn thrown. Understandable, since if that were the case it would be a nice time paradox. But no.

“Nothing,” she corrected, feeling completely bemused. “No pieces. No demolition. Just… not there anymore.”

“Well, fuck. The bloody cowards scarpered.”

“What the hell kind of word is ‘scarpered’?” 

He ignored her, fingers twitching at the sides of his jeans. After a second or two he let out an oath and leaned back against the nasty concrete wall, pulled his pack of Morleys out, dug for his miraculously-refilled Zippo, and lit up. His face took on a blissful expression, and he sighed heavily as the smoke curled out of his nostrils. “Christ, that makes it easier to think.”

“Is that why you do it? Because from my end it sure doesn’t seem to work.”

He flipped two fingers at her, though without any heat, making her smirk. Pulled in another drag and held it for a second, then sighed and let it out again, lines appearing between his eyes. “Thing of it is, we must’ve made a dent. Scared the buggers, if they made off with the whole bloody building. Must’ve decided to pack up shop and move to a different burgh, yeah?” He made a sour face and, arm jerking with a new and sudden irritation, flipped the half-smoked cigarette to the sloshy-wet floor of the tunnel and stubbed it out with his boot. “Bleedin’ ponce got his wish after all. Hail the conquering fucking hero and all that rot.”

She spent a minute parsing through that, then, “You know he doesn’t get nearly all the credit, right?”

Bitterness seemed to pervade her lover’s lithe frame. “His sodding idea, fighting the bastards. Even if it came out split figures.” He straightened grimly, replacing the pack of cigarettes and facing back the way they had come, resolute. “Got them out of his city, innit?”

She touched his hand. “He had a lot of help.”

He was still for a moment, but then his fingers sought hers, folded through. “Yeah.”

“And everyone knows how much it cost.”

He sighed heavily, a little smoke exiting on the exhale. “Too right.”

“So let him have it. And we’ll get out of here.”

His eyes found hers in the dark, and he quirked a faint, sardonic half-smile at her. “Yeah. Never wanted to be in this bleedin’ shithole anyway.”

“Well, next time you decide to be all ghosty, you have a standing invitation to come do it with me instead.” 

“Bite your tongue. I come over all spectral again, you’ll kill me.”

She almost couldn’t smile at that, because it hurt to think about. But she tried, tremulous though it was. “You know it. Forget I said it, and let’s go see a man about a plane.”

Spike grunted as he followed her back along the tunnel. “Ponce owes us that much.”

***

They tried the Hyperion next, since it seemed their best bet. Sewers all the way, since the line that went down Figueroa was light rail and Buffy wasn’t about to risk carrying a big pile of dust in a leather jacket just for the convenience. The route was familiar, at least, and took significantly less time when one’s party was not encumbered with an army full of injured and demoralized soldiers. 

They decamped into the tank-like basement of the hotel, back in time four-plus months and feeling bizarrely displaced by the fact that this had been _their_ room, here. Their couch-bed, but it no longer smelled of them. Their space, but now untouched by anything but the remnants of Cordelia’s light feminine touches and dust. It was just so goddamned _random_.

Buffy suppressed a shudder as they headed up the stairs. “Should we announce ourselves or something?” she asked over her shoulder.

“He knows. He’s here. Feels me; and he for bloody sure has heard us by now, on this bleeding noisy stair.” Spike was not at all pleased to have to do this; beg for transportation from his grandsire. But then, it just made sense, considering the other way might end him. 

/And we won’t be begging. He _owes_ us this much./ 

They exited the door and set aside their bags and weapons in the corridor. Stepped out through the short hall by the atrium to the main lobby to find the place seemingly deserted, so maybe they had been wrong in their guess as to Angel’s fallback position? No one was in the large, open space, but the way the light shone in through the high skylight made Spike look up uneasily. He wasn’t the only one. Between that and the glass doors to the garden-y area, this place was a death trap. “C’mon.” They sidled toward the sitting area, sticking to the wall, while she reflected grimly about the many ways in which Hell-A had exceeded their home dimension when it came to vampiric comforts. 

“It’s stained glass.” Angel’s voice broke through their concentration as they tiptoed around the edges of the room. “Hasn’t killed me yet.”

Buffy’s head jerked up, and she frowned. Where the hell was he?

Spike nodded toward the office behind the desk. /Oh. Well, nice of him to come out and say hi?/ “You sure?” she called uneasily.

“Just stay away from the doors. I haven’t done the vampire crab-walk in here since we first moved in. It’s hard on the instincts, but you get used to it.”

Spike made a sour face, but stepped a little into the light. When he didn’t immediately burst into flames his face twisted still further, but his body relaxed. Clearly he hadn’t been entirely certain that his grandsire wasn’t trying out some bizarre assassination technique. 

Of course, if he had been, Buffy would have immediately yanked her guy back into the shade. And then leaped over the counter to threaten her ex with a stake for being a dick. But it seemed that for now at least, the flag of truce was flying over their trio of relations. 

They rounded the counter and stepped behind it to lounge in the office door. Angel sat within, behind the huge, highly-polished old wood desk, surrounded by dark green walls. “Welcome back,” he told them with a faint ironic note to his voice. 

His nostrils flared then, as he caught wind of them. 

/Oh, right. Because you’re a vampire again. And we probably smell like sewer, and…/ Well, they _had_ had pretty much _all_ the sex today. But she wasn’t about to apologize to Angel for that. 

From the way Spike’s stance shifted, he was clearly enjoying his grandsire’s discomfiture. He didn’t rub it in though, because maybe he’d matured in the past few days? “We went to Arsehole and Bung first,” he offered without preamble. “Guess they decided to head south for the winter?”

Angel leaned back in his chair, relaxing a little at the lack of combative snark. “We must’ve made a dent, I guess.”

“Seems like.” Though her guy looked entirely at his ease, Buffy caught just the slightest edge of a fidget, and started a private countdown inside her head. 

“Well, that’s something,” Angel pointed out, shooting for glass half full. His eyes jerked very briefly to Buffy’s, slid away almost too fast to be considered an acknowledgment.

/Wow./ Kind of rude considering she had just let herself be a conduit for a whole touching conversation with his honey basically last night. Yes, she felt bad for him that he hadn’t been able to go to Cordelia after he’d died—god knew Buffy knew what it was like to be done and just want to be told it was okay to move on—but it wasn’t like it was her fault that the Powers or the Partners or whoever it was had decided he wasn’t done with the Fight yet. /We don’t get to decide these things, Angel, or I’d’ve been back all floaty in heaven years ago./ She found herself itching for Spike’s hand. /And look what I would’ve missed. So just hang in there. You never know what life might throw at you. And stop blaming me for being _happy_ on your bad day, because our happies are now mutually exclusive, and have been for a hot minute, okay?/

Unaware of her warring internal monologue, Spike responded to his grandsire with a sort of noncommittal, “Mmm.” And his fingers twitched.

/Oh, for fuck’s sake./ She was about to light the cigarette for him. Sometimes these two were enough to make her want to pull all her hair out. “So,” she interposed, now pretty thoroughly irritated at being ignored by her moody ex, “how many people have you run into already who remember you from… there?”

Angel winced a little, sitting up straight. “Five. Since yesterday.” His hands flattened out on his desk. “It’s weird.”

“Too bloody right,” Spike answered, and giving up, tugged out the pack of smokes.

/Ten seconds on the money./ “Five, huh?” Buffy repeated, kind of impressed. “We ran into two, and one of them was Spike’s neighbor.”

Angel’s mouth twisted. “Well, you two probably haven’t been out and about a lot.”

Spike snorted around his cigarette. Smoke drifted out around his mouth in a puff that was more than half cough as he choked on the dark chuckle he’d swallowed. 

The resentful remark would have made Buffy laugh out loud herself if she wasn’t kind of annoyed at her ex. /Okay, bitchy much?/ Yeah, maybe it was slightly cruel to wander in smelling like a ton of sex around a guy who had to really watch out to only have it if—she guessed—he didn’t super want it all that much, was the key? But still. Holla the snark-factor. 

Maybe it just really rubbed her the wrong way that Angel always seemed to find a way to make it sound like her relationship with Spike was _only_ about sex; like the thing with _him_ had been somehow more holy and sacred because it hadn’t had _any_ sex in it. /Because that’s so much better, to be all hot and bothered all the time and never ever get any relief out of the one relationship where you’re _supposed_ to put all that!/ And yeah; once upon a time she had been twisted enough to think that was romantic, and to even think she could handle it. But that had been before she had found out how incredibly _necessary_ excellent sex was to her constitution. Her mental health. Her general functioning. Her sanity. And, just, you know, life. 

It was kind of like eating and slaying and stuff, and maybe she was just as tactile as Spike, or god forbid, as orgasm-obsessed as Anya. /So sue me, Angel. Maybe you can manage okay without it, but starvation diets are just really not my jam. So don’t knock it, okay?/

Beside her, Spike’s posture lengthened from ‘lounge’ to ‘languor’… because he could read her like a damn book. 

/Showoff/ Buffy thought fondly. He was so not helping. Which meant she had to do all the diplomatic stuff. “How’s Gunn?” she asked, changing the subject briskly.

Angel’s demeanor went from resentful to worried. “He’s, uh, in a coma.”

“Oh, man…”

A little shrug. “I’m hoping he’ll pull through. He’s a tough kid. Though…” A little head shake. “He’s gonna need to want to, and after everything, that might take some convincing. To remember that he’s actually a good man. I know how that goes. I’m gonna do my best to tell him every day…” The eyes she’d once loved to distraction rose, pointed and piercing as they flitted from her to Spike. “Illyria’s there.”

The languor disappeared, the tension returning. “Oh, yeah?” Spike answered carefully. “How’s she holding up? She give up Oxford’s body finally?”

Angel played with a few things on the desk. Sighed. “Yeah. She’s mostly focused on watching over Gunn now. We’re worried that maybe some of the players from the other side might come after him. You know; the ones he killed there to get their artifacts? Revenge for helping to screw up their gig, since I doubt most of them are anything more than small-time on this side. Especially Sherman Oaks, since he was big on assassins; and Kr’ph…”

“Oh, man…” The thought of being killed by some demon assassin while in a coma and unable to fight back was terrifying. To have it done to you because of sins you’d committed under the influence of a demon while you were helpless to stop said demon from performing those acts was… 

Well, damn. The human behind the demon really did get the short end of the stick in all this vampire stuff, didn’t it? “I’m glad Illyria’s decided no hard feelings,” Buffy murmured. “He might need the protection if he’s going to last long enough to get past it all.”

“Yeah. Bloody hell. Never thought of what the buggers might do this side.” Spike’s lifted a boot to stub out his cigarette, suddenly all business. “You worried they might come after you, Peaches?”

/Crap./ Buffy turned back to her ex, abruptly anxious. “Angel?”

He shrugged again, waving it off. “I think if anything they’ll blame your boy Bro’os.”

There was a short silence as they both digested this, and then Spike barked a laugh, eyes catching Buffy’s. “Bloody Teeth better run fast. Can’t hide back in dear old Sunnyhell, can’t hide here. Poor bastard.”

“Yeah,” Buffy agreed a little sadly. “Guess we kind of screwed him.” Not that there was a lot of love lost between her and their cowardly, double-crossing shark-agent, but at least he’d come through in the end. 

“Don’t you waste sleep over Teeth, luv. He’s maimed and killed more harmless demons, paid off more debts in babies than you can shake a stick at.” His eyes twinkled at her, full of high good humor. “And think of the kittens it’ll save, not lettin’ the tosser set up in a new town, yeah?”

“I suppose there is that,” she agreed warmly, grateful as always for his ridiculously cynical sense of humor. “I’ll try to think of the kittens.” She turned back to her ex as a thought crossed her mind. “What happened to your dragon?”

The sudden non-sequitur caught Angel completely unawares. “She’s out in the atrium.” He frowned thoughtfully. “I have no clue what to do with her, actually.”

Spike grunted. “Tough to hide a bloody dragon, this side.”

“Theme-park attraction?” Buffy offered sweetly. “You could make nice side-money giving rides to the kids.”

“‘S what Betta George used to do, before,” Spike interjected laconically. At Buffy’s startled look, he elaborated with a small wave of the hand. “Stand-in for the bloody shark over at Universal, innit?”

“Huh.”

“I think the kids are all a little too traumatized for that,” Angel interrupted darkly.

/And there’s our sobering thought for the day./

Now that he’d brought down the mood for the moment, Angel sighed and leaned back in his chair once more. “Actually, I was thinking of giving it to Groo, if I can find him. You think he’d mind having two ‘Cordelias’ around?”

He was trying to lighten the mood again. At least there was that. Buffy fought not to roll her eyes at him. “I bet he’d love it,” she managed finally, and felt her throat tighten, thinking of the childlike glee of her former buddy, out there playing with a dragon and a Pegasus somewhere, delighted to have two ‘Cordys’ of his very own. Just the fact that he was probably alive once more was enough to make her fight back a big old lump of emotion. Him, and Gris and Rinne, and Lorne, and Maria, and…

And suddenly the time-loop trauma was worth it again.

Spike’s hand brushed her own as he took over the conversational baton. “You’re staying on, then, is it?”

Angel picked up an old pencil and tossed it lightly up along the desk. Caught it in his cupped hands when it rolled back to him. “This is where Connor is. This is where… Cordy was. And I need to clean up my mess.” He frowned fitfully. “Besides; someone’s gotta keep an eye on Gunn and Illyria…” His eyes flickered toward Spike once more, not quite accusingly. “So I figure, I reopen Angel Investigations. I never made a very good corporate lawyer anyway.”

Spike nodded once; a bare tip of the head as if he agreed with this decision, maybe even admired it a tiny bit. “I’d stay on a tick for the Smurf,” he answered quietly, his hand brushing Buffy’s once more to still her surprise, “but Buffy’s got a commitment, and whenever we’re around the Leather Queen, something about us seems to flip the bird’s instability switch anyway, so it seems best to keep our distance. Thought it was the humanity bit, but not so sure now…”

Angel rolled his eyes impatiently. “It’s the relationship, dammit, Spike,” he answered grimly. “She wanted to be human because she knew what Wes wanted from Fred. What she took. She thought if she could watch you two and figure out how to be that, then maybe she could bring him back and give him what she took from him. That’s why the obsession with the damn body and the damn plants and all of it.”

/Oh. Oh God…/ It made so much sense now. And to think, in retrospect, that every second Buffy had spent in the Pink Palace had just driven Illyria even more nuts, because the trapped demigod couldn’t figure out something so simple as how to empathize with what she and Spike had without even thinking about it. She could feel it rolling off of them, but hadn’t been able to replicate it. 

“Bloody hell,” Spike muttered, sounding regretful. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Angel grunted. “Because you were too wrapped up in getting your jollies off?” he suggested bluntly.

“Angel, knock it off!”

Angel sighed and tossed down the pencil. “Seriously, what brings you two here? Just checking in? Courtesy call?” Clearly by his voice he would rather they hadn’t, if that was the case.

“Actually, we came to ask you a favor.” Buffy kept her voice brisk, businesslike, but with that note in it that she knew he would read, and read well, as her cashing in the last of her chips with him. /After all, I kinda did you a solid last night in Hell-A when I gave you the big radio-in to Cordelia. I think you owe me./

His head lifted, and he eyed her directly for the first time. “What kind of a favor?” he asked, all suspicion. Not so much with the promising, which, um, wow. 

It turned her brisk. “I need to get back to Scotland, stat, and I kind of wanna do it without having to take Spike there in a Dustbuster. When Wolfram and Hart bounced off the map, do you know if their snazzy corporate jet went with them?” /You know, necro-glass and soft, comfy seats, lots of privacy? The one I assume you and Spike used to come to Italy and not talk to me or hang around long enough for me to realize that he was alive, because you’re both a couple of dicks? Even though technically I wasn’t there, but still./

There was a short tight silence, fraught with some serious resentment vibes. “You want me to loan you the corporate jet?”

“Least you could do, Peaches,” Spike put in, leaning back against the door-frame and kicking one foot back so he could pick some sewer-debris from his knee.

Angel seemed to puff up like he’d swallowed a bunch of hot air. “Why should I do that?” he asked in a voice that said he was working hard to remain calm. 

If he could stay calm, so could she. Act like a damn adult. /About seventy reasons, you big damn child./ “For one, I think we all owe each other the courtesy.”

Angel let out his lungful of air as if she’d punctured him, looking resentful.

“For another,” she persevered, “because I’m betting you really don’t want us to keep popping up in your office door taking a page out of Spike’s book…”

His head jerked up, expression taking on an alarmed cast. Beside her, Buffy felt Spike rumble with suppressed amusement.

“Third, I don’t think you really want our help rebuilding if it means putting up with seeing us, and smelling us…”

He groaned openly at that and shoved his hand through his hair. “You’re gonna leave either way,” he pointed out flatly. “I know you, Buffy. You have a job to do. You’re not gonna hang around…”

“I’d rather do it with a not-dead Spike. Which leads me to number four. I know you want me to be not-suicidal. So in the end, you’re gonna help.”

He rolled his eyes at her again. _“Suicidal,_ Buffy? Seriously; what are you, twelve?”

/Okay, way to diminish my emotional commitment. Also, that’s my line./ “You haven’t been around. I’ve been not-okay. Now I am. And the faster I get to where I need to go, the less I have to worry about whether I’m going to be too late to help Dawn and Xander and my people stay not-dead with the Scourge breathing down their necks.” She softened her eyes, her tone; tried to catch him in whatever was left of the place they had once built together. “Don’t make me choose, Angel.”

Spike’s hand caught hers once more, fingers threading into a hand now beating with the tattoo of building urgency. She had been trying not to think about it all morning, but… the clock was seriously ticking. If they could get out of here soon, she’d be up in Glasgow with Spike in what would be, for her people at least, only two-and-a-half days gone instead of three, even counting all the dinking around at the Florence airport waiting for a last-minute flights. Thank goodness for a twenty-hour time-difference.

The silence dragged on long enough that it hit Spike’s impatience button. “Look, Peaches. It seems like a right nice deal, yeah? We go on our merry way. You get the credit. We get the bloody fuck out of here. Out from under your nose so you don’t have to watch us be all blissful, innit? Everybody wins.”

Angel’s eyes flickered to Buffy, dark and anguished. “No,” he said quietly. “I don’t think so.” He looked away then, clearly surrendering. “I’ll call them and tell them to gas up. If it’s still there at all you can use it for as long as you want.”

She could breathe again. Pulled in the oxygen and nodded, letting it out. “Thank you.” That would seriously be a help, considering they might have to cart Dawn over to St. Petersburg, after, and she wasn’t exactly easy to move from place to place right now. He didn’t need to offer them such an open-ended lease. He could’ve been stingier about it. But he had decided to be a big boy and let it all go. To be generous, even, because sometimes he still reminded her of why she had once loved him to such distraction.

“You’re welcome,” he answered, as quietly, and pushed himself to his feet. Hesitated, hands in his pockets. “I probably won’t see you again for a while, huh?”

“No,” she answered sadly, aware this was probably, honestly, a very real goodbye for them. Bittersweet, if not in the same way as so many of their other goodbyes. A true farewell, this time. An ending. 

Angel nodded, looking a little forlorn, and it was clear what he wanted to close the door on a good note, but he wasn’t going to ask. And, alright, she wanted that too, if only to put it all to rest in her mind. To stop feeling the guilt for what she hadn’t given him that night up on the gallery up there when she’d shut him down and let him know it was never going to be. 

She turned to Spike. Gave him one quick look. He rolled his eyes and tossed his butt down on the floor, his opinion plain. And turned to walk out of the room, to wait by the counter. He wouldn’t watch, but he wasn’t going to begrudge the farewell. 

They had come that far, at least. 

With a sigh, she approached her first love. Watched as his hands came out of his pockets. It was easier without Spike there, and she let Angel put his arms round her. Closed her eyes, and just for a second, let herself breath in the familiar scent of a man she had once loved with all her heart. Someone she had thought she might find again, spend her life with. So strange, to feel his body against her now, to slide her arms around him. He seemed too large and bulky, almost; and it was strange in a way to feel him cool again after Hell-A and humanity. Almost scary, too, to feel him real, after holding him and feeling him die in her arms. The memory combatted all the good ones, made her tremble slightly with the tumult. So many good, so many bad events. 

That was Angel, for her. /That’s us./ Every memory, every smell, every sensation was good warring with bad. Safety-become-pain. Sex-become-shame. Love-become-loss. Life-become-death. Joy-become-regret. Nothing sacred, everything sorrow. 

“It never really mattered, did it?” he asked her softly, his lighter voice startling after months of Spike’s low, purring rumble. “When I’m human, you want a vampire. When I’m a vamp, I’m not the right one…” 

She couldn’t answer. There was nothing to say. /We aren’t right, Angel. We never were. We were… a time and a place that’s over. We’re a sword in the chest and a pit in the ground, an exploded, burnt-out shell and a bed where someone lost her innocence in a flash and saw horrors. We’ve never come back from that, and I’m sorry if you can’t climb out. But thank God, I have./

/A hand reached down and pulled me up. And I’m gonna be smart enough this time to take it; and to keep hold./

He sighed and let her go. “I love you, Buffy. I hope you’re happy.”

“I am,” she whispered back, pulling away. “I hope you find some peace, Angel. Whether you believe it or not, I think you deserve it.”

His eyes, of course, said he would never believe it. Which meant he’d never have it. And it wasn’t on her to keep trying to throw her love into that black hole. It would kill her, in the end, like a draining bite that would never stop, and gave nothing back. 

He knew, of course, what she wasn’t going to give him anymore. What he used to always get back from her, unquestioned. He didn’t wait for it now. “Fly safe.”

She nodded. 

Something tightened a little between them. “If he ever hurts you, I’ll dust him myself.”

She scoffed, rolling her eyes. /You’ll try./ 

“What? I can do that! He’s my grandchilde! I can take him over my knee and spank him if I want to!”

“I beat you fair and square already once, Gramps,” Spike called from outside the doorway. “Pull the other one.”

Angel’s head jerked up. “You cheated, Spike,” he called back. “And anyway, that fight didn’t count.”

“Oh, I’m awfully bleeding sorry you didn’t have a referee to count time for your civilized brawl when I kicked your ass, Peaches.” Back in the doorway, Spike lifted his chin at them, brow up and expectant. “Are we off, luv?”

Buffy looked from one to the other of them. “This sounds like an interesting story.” 

“Not really,” Angel answered, crossing his arms, and his eyes bounced back to Spike’s, grim and determined. “Just don’t hurt her.” It snapped off bitterly; the tones of a man who didn’t want to beg, but let it come out because it was all he had left.

Spike, for a wonder, relented. Gave a stiff nod. “Rather die,” he answered quietly. “Ever do, you won’t have to dust me. I’ll have already done it meself.”

“Good.”

Another short nod exchanged, and Spike was turning away. 

/I guess that’s it./ It felt like a weird place to leave things. 

Maybe Spike felt so too, because he halted, back still turned. “You take care of yourself, Peaches. Try to stay out of bloody trouble, yeah?”

Some of the tension went out of the room. “I’ll try.”

“Good.” Spike was walking again, heading back for their bags.

Buffy caught Angel’s eye once more. “Talk to you sometime.”

“Yeah.”

“Stay safe.”

“Bye, Buffy.”

/Goodbye, Angel./

***  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Buhbye LA! See y'all Saturday!  
"What happens Saturday?"  
"We join the mile high club!"  
  
(I mean, c'mon, like I was gonna let a chance like that slip by? Some tropes are just not to be trifled with.)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, I know, I owe a ton of comment-replies again... and I was late on this. So much for Saturday.  
> Life got hectic.  
> But know I really appreciate everyone.  
> But first...  
> MILE HIGH CLUB!  
> And the ongoing theme of debauching Buffy with foodstuffs, lol. Because I'm a hedonist, and I'm living vicariously.
> 
> Also, don't hate me for the (minor) cliffhanger.  
> *innocent look*

Angel’s corporate jet was indeed still extant, which saved them from a long time spent loitering in an increasing welter of anxiety in the limbo of LAX. It really was kind of cool to get the VIP treatment; to just get to check Spike’s suitcase and—yeah—the weapons, even, because serious WR&H cachet, scan their passports, and step right down onto the tarmac. Hop right up without waiting for all that boarding rigmarole or any of it, get a little salute from a weirdly-uniformed pilot, step up onto the tiny stairway-door-thing of the small jet, and that was it. Ready to be out. 

Plus, that plane was totes _nice_.

The seats, for one, were cushy as hell. White leather—real _leather_ , no joke—and so soft Buffy swore she was sitting on some kind of high-class recliner instead of an airplane seat. Private tables. A bench seat on one side. The copilot announcing, before they taxied, that the meal tonight would be—literally—lobster with filet mignon, a 1975 Cabernet Sauvignon from some vineyard she’d never heard of that sounded French, and “An excellent type-O negative for the gentleman”. 

“I guess it is a few bloody steps above first class,” Spike allowed finally, grinning at her as he settled back with his glass of blood in, yes, an actual crystal goblet, because why not. He nodded as the copilot wandered by. “Oi. Remember me, do you?”

“Of course, Sir.”

“You wanna bring the wine by now? Like to mix it in with the blood, yeah?”

“Whatever the gentleman desires.” The guy strode briskly forward toward the front of the plane with eyes discreetly forward, came back quickly with the bottle and another wineglass, wine key in hand. Set the second glass in front of Buffy with a courteous head-tilt while still managing to completely avoid her eye, and very efficiently popped the thing open and fixed some kind of weird snout-thing onto it while she watched the smooth maneuver in awe. 

/Wow, this is like being in a five-star restaurant!/

He moved to pour for her first, and she blinked. “Oh, um, only a little for me. I usually only like it with food…”

Spike’s lips twitched. “That’s a Haut Brion, luv, and a seventy-five to boot. It’s not some Wild Vines zinfandel or box wine special like you and the Scoobies drank. You don’t need to pair it with something to get it down. It’ll melt in your mouth and you’ll forget your own name when it hits your tongue.” He held out his own glass, eyes nearly as hungry-looking as when she was poised to take him into her body. “Christ, I can’t wait to watch you taste it. Though I think I’d rather our friend here’s out of the cabin first, so I can enjoy the show in private.”

To his credit, the apparently super-well-trained copilot-guy didn’t even blush at this. Maybe he was just really used to people getting it on during WR&H flights?

Buffy had seldom seen Spike look so damned reverent about any alcohol; even his standard whiskey. It would be nice if the beverage lived up to advertising, but she was privately more than a little dubious that any wine—or any alcohol at all, really—could taste as good as advertised. 

High-class wine-drinking apparently came with a lot of ceremony. She noticed, as the copilot poured for her, that he didn’t just slop the stuff into the glass. He poured it like it was some kind of precious resource, tilting her goblet at a weird angle and letting it bubble slowly through the thing on the top of the bottle in some kind of odd procedure that made really distinctive odors waft out of the container and hover in the air around them. Tart ones, sharp ones, something she swore smelled like… chocolate?

Across from her, Spike had his eyes closed and was sniffing like it was some kind of ambrosia. “Bloody fuck,” he murmured at one point. 

“What’s the deal on the top?” she asked, fascinated. 

“It’s called an aerator, pet. Lets the wine breathe without it taking half an hour.” Apparently he was going to be her guide for the evening, and the copilot was going to stick with being selectively-mute guy as he turned next to top off the glass of blood. Spike held it out all eagerly, totally acting like he was getting some kind of special prize or something.

Watching the wine go into the blood was actually really neat. The new liquid was thinner and, maybe cooler? Anyway, it curled and drifted through and under the surface of the blood, twisting around and making neat shapes like some kind of bizarre lava lamp made out of only really subtle color differences, the show prompting Buffy to lean forward abruptly to lay her palm against the goblet as their impromptu steward straightened up. The glass was a riot of warm-as-her-hand with drifts of room-temperature sliding by in between. Thin and thick, wine and blood, and just… “That’s warm!”

Spike lifted the beverage in a toast. “Full service, yeah? Sacred and the bloody profane, all in one go, cheers to first class air travel.”

Just, wow. “How’d they warm it up in here?” Her eyes jerked over to the copilot, but the guy had already vanished back to the front of the plane to help with the pre-flight checklist or whatever. She noticed, though, that he left the bottle behind.

“This is a fancy establishment, luv, for all it’s mobile.”

She jerked her gaze back to her lover and, what the hell. Lifted her own glass, because obviously by the time they got to Scotland the stuff would wear off anyway. Cocked an eye back at him and matched his challenging grin with a shy smile. “I could get used to this.”

“Sip it slow, beautiful,” he murmured, and lifted his glass to his lips. “Don’t waste the experience.”

She took his advice seriously, watching him as he started. A swirl of the contents, using some kind of bizarre wrist motion. Okay? A sniff. And wow, that really made all the smells come up. And she had to admit there really were a lot, even for a not-quite-human schnoz. More than she could really pinpoint right now, there were so many, and how could a vampire nose handle all that? But his eyes were closed at this point, his expression something verging on ecstatic. She had only seen him look like this when he was facedown between her legs, so… Alrighty then. 

“Once the bouquet is a part of you,” he told her reverently, “then you take a sip. Small one, mind. Hold it in your mouth for a mo’, and just let it rise up. Let your mouth get to know it. Parse it all out, one flavor at a time. Then let it trickle slow, down the back of your throat…” Suiting action to words, he tilted one small sip of his mixture into his mouth, making a weird little slurping sound as he did so—he kind of sounded like the aerator thing—and did a little swish. Then he actually _moaned_. 

The sound went right to her clit. /Wow, is it really that good?/ “I thought you were a whiskey drinker.”

He didn’t answer for a long time. Just sat there, holding the wine in his mouth. And then finally he swallowed, slowly enough that she swore she could see his adam’s apple bobbing in slow motion. “I am, but this is nothing to sneeze at, Buffy.” His eyes opened to focus on her again, intent as hell. “Once in a lifetime experience. Try it.” 

/Okay then./ Sure she was going to let him down, be less than impressed, she dribbled a small sip into her mouth. At first the flavors sitting on her tongue were a massive, overwhelming muddle of impressions; a complex, rising aroma in the back of her throat and rapidly floating up into her nose. Smell-tastes that felt like…

Wow, okay, it tasted like Spike smelled. Like the duster, and smoke, and tobacco, and how did a _wine_ taste like her lover _smelled?_

Her automatic urge was, of course, to swallow what was on her tongue (because, Spike), but she held on and waited patiently for more information. And caught the next thing. Coffee? And dark chocolate? And something else familiar; something that vaguely reminded her of mornings, and Mom… Super comforting, which was a weird juxtaposition. Something like breakfast and fruit—a plummy or maybe a blackberry sort of thing—and… 

There was even something in there vaguely like the smell of tea, which made her think of sitting quietly in Giles’ old apartment, and holy cow, what even…

“Cinnamon and silk,” Spike murmured, his voice rumbling a counterpoint to her stunned ruminations. “Smoke and herbs and earth; sweet and rich as quim and dark as night.” His thumb rubbed over her hand, and when had he caught hold of her? “Now swallow it down, luv, and tell me what you thought.”

It trickled slowly down the back of her throat, leaving a trail of even more flavor, and man, it was still doing things back there! She didn’t even know her tongue could still _taste_ that far back! “Oh. My. God…” she breathed, and shuddered as the aftertaste rippled through her. 

It still tasted like Spike.

Then the burn started in her belly; much more mellow than grappa or rum or that harsh bourbon he had shared with her that one friendly night in his crypt. Still enough to warm her. Loosen things a little. Make her want more. “Is it all like that?” she whispered, floored.

“No. But at damn near five hundred quid a bottle, this ought to be,” he answered, a chuckle in his voice, and absently reached out to top her off, because he was a terrible influence. “Wait till you have it with the lobster.” He lifted his glass again, eyes sparkling as he made his predictions. “The bleedin’ steak is gonna have you on the floor.” He sounded like he couldn’t wait.

“What a way to fly,” she managed, still breathing a little heavily. No wonder people did wine-tasting like it was a sport. She’d had no idea.

She reached out for her glass, took another small sip. And jumped when she felt Spike’s naked toes wander up along the inside of her ankle, rucking up the cuff of her slacks. “Problem is,” he went on casually, for all the world as if he were innocently sitting there doing nothing, “you gotta sell your soul to an evil law firm to get the perks.”

Cool pressure, sliding up. Prodding here and there, promising all kinds of diabolical treats in store while her mouth was full of flavors that really, just really tasted exactly like kissing him… and she was losing swift track of the conversation. She swallowed the wine in her mouth, kind of regretfully, to reply. Managed a, “Yeah,” in agreement, because it sounded like the kind of sentiment that required assent. When the hell had he taken his boots off? 

“Christ, you’re easy, Buffy.”

“Hmm?” Took another sip. God, this stuff was good. 

“You’re already glowing, too.”

She didn’t want to swallow yet to reply, so she hummed back, eyes closed, and let him take dastardly advantage of her captive… where was he at this point? The inside of her knee… 

Her eyes snapped open as the wine went down. “Wait. Did you just call me easy?”

His eyes were dancing on hers. “Only for me, luv. C’mon, have another.”

She probably shouldn’t. She didn’t need the help. She was already starting to shiver pleasantly, and the warmth in her belly was migrating south at a rapid rate; an exodus that coincided, incidentally, with a wider movement as the plane started to head out. And an unobtrusive, almost apologetic voice clicked on from the pilot’s cabin, reminding her that they were technically not alone, which… alright, always managed to send her heart-rate up another notch. “We’ve been given clearance,” the speaker told them from some distant corner of the world, “and are taxiing. Please fasten your seatbelts until the light is clear above the door. Dinner will be served promptly at seven, cabin time, unless otherwise requested.” _Click_.

Buffy fumbled with the seatbelt, not even entirely aware of what she was doing.

“Good thing we had you sup at the airport,” Spike pointed out, toes now somewhere in the vicinity of her mid-thigh. He had given up slithering around underneath her pants by now, but since the slacks were of the uber-thin, cottony type, it didn’t really make much difference, sensation-wise. 

“Mmmhmm.” At this point she was basically holding her breath, fingers clinging hard to the polished wood table. 

“Hang on to your glass, luv. They’re about to put the hammer down.”

She fumbled for the stem of her wineglass and clung, whimpering as his toes flirted with the very tops of her thighs. “You’re evil,” she whispered.

“Only sometimes. Have another sip?”

She did, blindly. And almost choked when the plane very abruptly shot into gear and ramped up to takeoff speed; much faster than the bigger jets did it. Because at exactly the same instant, Spike’s toes slid home and began working her clit… and how the hell could his _toes_ be almost as good as his fingers? 

Was this why he’d maneuvered her into sitting in the backward-facing seat? The pressure of acceleration had her pressed hard against his honestly absurdly skilled nether digits… And fine. She was already bent over the table, clinging hard and gasping; and probably calling him names, the way he was laughing. She could hear him distantly, but there was nothing she could do about it, because he was stroking, repetitive and firm and exactly right somehow, and then a little faster, just enough through the stupid pants, and she was going to come from him getting her off in the most stupidly ridiculous way possible. It was horribly embarrassing, but she was already rigid and jerking against the table, because her body was just too damned used to doing what he told it to do, damn it, and he was too good at talking to certain parts of her, she had no chance…

She thought she heard him whisper something. Caught the edges of a word… Lost the shape of it as everything inside her tightened up. Because he was some kind of stupid sex savant, he even timed it so that she came just as the plane lifted off the ground, the sudden gravity slamming her down on his toes, and… / _God!_ /

She almost broke the stem of the wineglass.

He snatched it out of her nerveless fingers before she could spill the contents. “Nuhuh, pet. This stuff’s too good to waste.”

She wasn’t paying him any attention. She was too busy trying to catch her breath against the g-forces as they rose… which was kind of hard to do when you were facedown on a table with your chest heaving. “You,” she managed after some significantly long period, “are a cold, calculated devil.”

There was a brief silence from the other end of the table, and then his toes were back, but this time merely stroking coolly atop one thigh and then the other. Quietening her. And she swore she heard him murmur that word again; the one that kept escaping her, just barely on the edges of hearing. So she pushed her hands down enough to turn her head, though it took massive effort, and got a look at his face. He was watching her with that expression again; the worshipful one. Awe and delight, all wrapped up together. “What are you saying?” she asked him, feeling wrung out and heavy. 

He shook his head, still holding the two wine glasses very carefully just above the level of their ascent-canted table. His ridiculous foot slipped away from her overheated flesh, his lips quirking at her query... But his mask, she saw, was back up. Self-mocking, even. “Nothing, luv. You’re gorgeous, is all.”

/Oh hell no./ It gave her the energy to push herself up; to eye him frankly. “Thank you. But that’s not what you said.”

He sighed. “Demanding chit.”

“When you’re trying to slip things by me while I’m completely distracted by… No, wait. I’ll ask you how the hell you can do so much with your freaking _toes_ later. William…”

He flinched. “I said ‘you’re effulgent’.”

/Oh. Oh, man./ She felt the slow smile cross her face. Leaned forward to touch the back of his hand where it clutched the stem of her glass. “I love you too.”

His eyes closed briefly. And when he reopened them, they glowed on her a shocking blue and radiant with love.

The minute they were free to move about the cabin, she made sure they finished what he had started. Which… He seemed pretty okay with that.

***

She was still savoring the last of the wine-and-dinner thing, uncertain if she liked the cabernet better with the melt-in-your mouth, medium-rare steak or the (massive) lobster tail (because holy cow, it was amazing with both of them in completely different ways. Like, the butter thing. Just, wow. But also, good goddamn, the _steak_ ), when the mad clicking penetrated her consciousness to interrupt her whole wine love-affair. She glanced over at the other side of the cabin and sighed. 

Spike was sitting on the end of the side-bench thing, bent over one knee, opening and shutting his Zippo in that rapid-fire way that said he was anxious as hell and getting worse, while he stared sightlessly into the unlit wick like he wished he could pace, or smoke, or flirt with open flame, or maybe just kill something. 

By the time he got to high-state fidget like this, he was already in a serious mess over something. He was also about as good as she was at being cooped up when he was stressed. Thing was, Buffy really wasn’t sure how he was managing to keep an edge on at all, considering she was about as limp and relaxed as a warm dishrag. Scourge? Meh. Xander? Bah. Dawn? Still gonna be a giant tomorrow. And yet, look at this guy. /You’d think all the sex we’ve been having would have taken the edge off at least a little, huh?/

Apparently not, though.

She kind of thought it was a measure of how far they had progressed in their relationship that she didn’t snap at him for being irritating like she would have back in Sunnydale. Instead she pushed back the remains of her plate and sighed patiently. “It’s going to be all right, you know. She loves you.”

That jerked his attention right over to her… and she was stunned to see not sarcasm or defensive snark or any of the old standbys written in that sculpted, gorgeous face. The only thing to be read there was plain old terror, fencing off the wild blue of his eyes. “I don’t know, Buffy. She was pretty brassed off at me the last time I came back from the great beyond and tried to push my way back into her life.” He looked down at his hands, his now-closed lighter. “Your life. She told me if I ever touched you again she’d set me on fire. And she meant it. The Bit is nothing if not your little clone. Strong as you and just as feisty…”

The tragic irony of it was, even if she might’ve celebrated Dawn’s epic pronouncement once, it was those very words that assured him of his welcome back into the fold. “That was before,” Buffy answered softly. “This is now. She’s been crying herself to sleep over you, too.” It was easier to admit to that now. And, the concept seemed to blow him away, that he’d had two Summers women shedding tears over him. Before he could say a thing, either to protest or to startle, she pushed on. “And, the simple fact that that’s how you died has had her up nights feeling so guilty she can barely live with herself.”

“Oh, bleeding Christ.” He was on his feet at that, pacing in earnest. “It wasn’t like she wished it on me! I _chose_ it!”   
  
/Yeah, and we should maybe talk about that someday./ “Well, you didn’t know what the stupid amulet was gonna do to you.” It still hurt, though.

Disbelieving eyes cut to hers. “She’s really missed me?”

She kept her gaze steady on his. “More than you can imagine. You’re the third parent who’s died on her.”

He appeared utterly astonished at that. “Wha…”

“Mom. Tara. Now you.”

He sat down hard. “I’m no one’s bleeding…”

/Oh, c’mon, Spike; I thought you were perceptive./ He was blind as a bat, sometimes. “Who raised her while I was gone? You and Tara. Willow was working on resurrecting me most of the time. Dawn says she was barely ever there. But you were; every night.” She lifted her eyes to meet his, because she wanted him to know… she _knew_ , now. /Yeah, she told me./ Brought it down again, like a hammer blow. “You and Tara. And then Tara got shot and you burned. All within a couple years of Dad leaving, then Mom dying, and losing me.” He winced at the blunt recital. Buffy pushed on ruthlessly. “She’s been a mess over you, Spike. I think half the reason she was so upset about what happened between us is because she completely hero-worshipped you, and it never occurred to her that she couldn’t trust you completely, so the thought that you could make a single mistake completely threw her.”

“Christ…”

“Especially after she’d just lost someone she loved as much as she did Tara.” Buffy shrugged into her hands. “God knows I was basically a ghost for most of that year, so when she lost faith in you it was probably like losing you right afterward. I think she felt like she was just barely starting to get you back when you… you know. Died.”

His head dropped into his hands. “Bloody fuck.”

She could afford a little pity, now. “So, yeah. She’s going to be ecstatic to see you, okay? Calm down and stop twitching. And be prepared for a lot of high-pitched squeals, and for her to try to completely monopolize your attention for a while.” Buffy felt a faint, fond smile cross her lips. “I might not see you again for a month or so once we land.”

He digested that for approximately five solid minutes, then stood to move toward the table, joining her. “Buffy, I…” He halted. Jerked his head once in negation.

Vulnerability was still new. She pulled his head over. Caught his lips with hers, kissed him for a long minute, to shore him up and remind him she would never again take advantage. “What?”

He breathed against her for a sec, eyes closed. “Even when I was here before—Europe, yeah?—I didn’t really have a family. We called it that, but…” A little, dismissive shrug. 

/The other Scourge of Europe./ She supposed it was a family, if a dysfunctional one, but she wouldn’t really wish it on anyone. Least of all her guy.

“Last time I did was when I was a lad. Lost my elder brother to pneumonia, when he was away at school. Barely remember him. My younger sister of some fever… I dunno. Don’t remember what it was. The measle, maybe. Think there was a stillborn too. Then my father…”

/God, was that kind of tragedy… normal, back then? Or were you just been born to have a totally heartbreaking life?/ 

“Mum was all I had, and I was all she had. And then all I had was Dru…”

It really hit her, finally. /Just one woman at a time. One alone, to love and to lose./

“Now you and the Bit,” he went on.

/You’re daring to love more people than one. More people than just me, finally, loving my mom and Dawn. Not complicated and broken like with Angel, or whatever you had with your own father, ‘cause you barely remembered him. And then Mom died…/

Another shaky breath. “I feel like… I might be gettin’ a family again, for the first time since I can scarce recall, and it terrifies me, ‘cause what if I lose you all again?”

/God./ “Is that why you were so overprotective?” Buffy asked quietly, and lifted a gentle hand to his cheek. That was another thing Dawn had told her, during one of those long, mutually heartbreaking nights up talking about the man, the vampire they’d lost. She’d mostly comforted her sister. Had seldom opened up herself, because somehow hearing someone else talk about Spike had been easier than… Well. She hadn’t been able to open that door for her own part without falling to pieces. But leaving the door ajar a little for Dawn’s sake had been something of a pressure-release valve on those nights when she had been close to losing her mind from the agony of loneliness and guilt and loss. Just knowing that she wasn’t alone in that was…

It had helped. A little.

Spike shook his head. “That, and, I’d made you a promise. Wasn’t gonna break it, even if I’d already failed you. Never again. But…” His voice hitched. “I wonder sometimes; what would my wee sister have looked like, did she grow up to see Dawn’s age. What would she have looked like on her wedding day, would she have been happy? Never know, but…”

“But you see her in Dawn.”

He didn’t need to respond. He did anyway. “Don’t even really remember what she looked like to see her in anyone, Buffy. She’s a bloody figment, yeah? Not fair to the Bit to see anyone in her but herself. Just… sometimes…”

Buffy slid her fingers into his, on his lap. “I get it.”

He trembled a little. “I love the Bit, Buffy. Not just ‘cause of you. Love the bloody hell out of that irritating little chit. Want the best for her. The thought that I’ve caused her harm…”

“She had to learn everyone falls down.”

That brought him back to his feet, an agitated mess. “Not like _that!_ And she shouldn’t’ve been looking up to someone like me in the first damned place! What the bloody fuck was she _thinking?”_

He was beautiful when he cared so much. The fact that it really was only about her and her sister, her mother, was kind of amazing, but the way he did when he did… It was with _all_ of him. “Spike. She’s thinking that you’re a really incredible guy and she loves you.” 

“Oh, Christ,” he whispered again, subsiding back to the seat.

“Obviously I happen to agree with her.”

His shoulders shook, and she wasn’t sure if it was because he was laughing or crying. “Yeah, well, I have an unfair advantage with you. Can shag you blind whenever you start realizing you should run like hell away from me. Dawn’s got no damned excuse.”

“Well, then, maybe you should take her opinion as the unbiased one. The whats-it-called. The control group.”

He leaned back and narrowed his eyes at her. “No more sodding psychology classes for you, Buffy.”

She smirked at him and tousled his hair, messing up its newly-gelled perfection, if only because she knew it would put his back up. He’d need the mock-irritation to get him back on his metaphorical feet.

“Oi! Mind the hair! I’m not a bloody doll!” No burning look though; just a confused, upheaved sort of expression, like he still felt a little lost. 

She slid the offending hand down to fold it back in his. “You wanna get some sleep? Table this till we land?” She couldn’t quite help the yawn, even though they’d only been up for like thirteen hours. “Somebody fed me a bunch of wine, and I think it’s gone to my head.”

He regarded her with blatant disbelief at that. “I only got you started, luv. You kept right on under your own steam, after.” He nodded pointedly at the nearly-empty bottle.

“You helped.” 

“Yeah, well. Vampire constitution. Doesn’t do a damn thing to me.”

She lifted an eyebrow. “I dunno. You’re kind of emotional.”

That earned her a mild sort of glare. “Sod off, Slayer.” But there was no heat to it. 

She laughed a little and tugged at his arm. “C’mon. Where do you want to sleep in this thing?”

He sighed and pinched either side of the armrest between them. The uber-comfy seats promptly zoomed back to a damn-near laying-down position. “That do you, luv?”

/Ugh./ “I suppose. Not a big fan of this thing in the way.” She jerked halfheartedly at the thick metal-and-wood armrest standing in between them. 

Curling his body, Spike wrapped his arms firmly around her upper torso. “Slept worse places. We’ll work around it.”

“Mmm.” She snuggled down, shoving her hands up under his duster, and got her nose right up against the hollow of his throat. She’d really missed the smell of that coat. The way it complemented his skin. “How long before you think you’ll be back to the nocturnal life, here?” She’d really gotten used to being on the same schedule with him, living in Hell-A.

“Dunno,” he rumbled, voice emanating, it seemed, from his chest. “Don’t really sleep much anymore, at my age. I’ll stay with you as much as I can. Whenever you want me about…”

“Okay, but you know that’s pretty much all the time. And Dawn gets you when I’m busy. We’re gonna have to write your downtime in on a schedule somewhere.”

He grunted and kissed the top of her head. “I love you, Buffy.”

She smiled into his sternum, unable to remember a time when she hadn’t wanted to hear that. When she hadn’t wanted to say it back. “I really love you, William.”

He shivered a little, arrested the way he always was whenever she used his given name… but he didn’t protest. And she knew he watched her while she slept.

***

It was kind of tough to get a cab-ride that late. They touched down in Paisley—the town that housed Glasgow’s airport—at like eleven PM local time, and while there were a number of shiny black British taxis hanging around outside that establishment, not a lot of them seemed interested in driving them out into the middle of the countryside at damn near midnight. “Why’n name o’Christ ye wanna gie tae Barrheid so fackin’ late, beggin’ yer pardon, ma’am? Ye c’n get a fine hostel here in toon for nobbut a few pounds, start fresh in the mornin’…”

“Got a deadline, innit?” Spike interrupted the almost unintelligible flow of Glaswegian—sometimes Buffy could swear she understood maybe one-third of it on a good day—and held out a few extra notes of the brightly-colored currency they used up here in Scotland. “Bit extra for you if get us there in a right hurry.”

The cabby, a woman this time, with a shock of wavy, graying red-brown hair, sighed and put the car in gear. “Dinna say I didna warn ye, but ye’ll no find anywhere tae stop owernight in Barrheid. Place rolls up the mats at nine.” A snort. “E’en the pubs are locked up by th’ noo.”

“Bloody sin,” Spike replied, sounding mildly offended.

Buffy resettled their belongings in the seat and scooted over a little more to make room. “It’s alright. We’ve got someone to meet us out there.” /Maybe./ She’d texted Xander, but so far there wasn’t any answer. They might end up walking the last four miles or so from the town to the castle in the wee hours. Which would actually be kind of pleasant, really, considering that the Scottish summer was full on right now. The sky was kind of purplish, the further they got out of Paisley, almost glowy. Not quite a midnight-sun effect, but pretty subtly spectacular. It might make a nice, romantic last gasp before they plunged into the business of war preparations and crowds and the demands of real life.

Now that it was seriously on them, she was kind of not really looking forward to reentry. 

Barrhead was about a twenty-minute drive outside of the working-class suburb that was Paisley. Most of the drive took place in the midst of darkened countryside. They spent it in companionable silence, lost in their own thoughts, leaning against each other. Once she had told Spike, _“I can be alone with you”._ Which was still true, in a way, in that she could be alone with her thoughts and still be totally safe in his presence; totally free. And yet, she was not really _alone_. Not at all. That was the beautiful contradiction of it. She loved that about their silences.

“Here in town, luv?” he asked softly as they approached a new set of lights. “Or maybe a bit outside?” 

Buffy roused herself from the vague impressions of ancient buildings to get her bearings. /Oh, right./ She’d completely forgotten he had no idea where they were going. “Uh, can you keep on through town and pull over just outside? There’s one of those…” She frowned, unable to remember what they were called here. “Not a rest stop, but kind of a turnout a couple miles out…”

“Drop us in the lay-by,” Spike translated, smirking in the lights as they shone through the windows. “Our mates’ll find us there.”

“That’s another couple quid.”

“Have the dosh to cover it.”

Their driver subsided back into silence as she steered them through town. It was obvious that she thought them insane axe-murderers or something. Which was fair, considering that their ‘replica weapons for a reenactment festival’ were dinged up and notched and generally looked all too lethal for toys. Not to mention that despite all efforts to clean them, they retained the odd bloodstain from the battle behind the Hyperion. /Maybe a little too realistic for ‘reenactments’./

The woman seemed all too glad to get them out of there when she pulled off into the slow vehicle turnout, or at least she peeled out to head back the minute she had her hands on the remainder of the cash. “I guess we seem creepy?”

Spike shrugged easily in the dark. “No answer from the crew?”

“They’re probably sleeping.”

He grunted. “We leg it, then.” He eyed the long, shallow slope on the far side of the turnout. “How far is it from here, pet?”

“A couple of miles, I guess?”

A quick glance at the sky. “Could be worse. Hell of a night, for this bloody country.”

She watched him with interest, the faintly purple light limning his features in the dark. “How long since you’ve been up here?”

That brought his gaze back to her. “Long time. Seventy-odd years, I guess.” He looked around himself, frowning thoughtfully. “Lot’s changed. Lot’s stayed the same. Things move slow on this side of the pond.” A short pause. “Still smells the same.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” she answered, biting back a smile at his expense.

“Don’t mock me, you daft bird. Someday I’ll take you to London. Really show you a place with some history.”

She grinned at the enthusiasm in his voice. “Every time I landed there, I had the cab take me the long way through the city. Listened to the people talk…”

He struck out up the hill, frowning. “Why the bloody hell did you fly into London, if you were moving the whole kit up here? Long bleeding way around, innit?”

She took several long strides to catch up. “So I could drive the long way through the city,” she answered him softly, “and listen to the people talk.”

He faltered. Stopped stock-still. “Because you missed me?”

“Yeah. You idiot.”

He turned suddenly. Pulled her tight into his arms. “I’m so bloody sorry I left you alone, Buffy.”

She let herself burrow for a second before shoving her free fist into his chest. Thumped it a little in old frustration. Kissed his throat, because at least it was over. “Yeah. I’m still kind of really mad at you. You jerk.”

“Christ, pet… If I knew…” 

“Well, now you can take me on a real tour, sometime.” She pushed away to start back up the hill, purposeful once more, axe clutched in her hand. “I never had the time, but I think once this stupid Scourge thing is over and we get Dawn right-sized, I’m gonna want a nice vacation.” She kicked a dark something out of her way. Hunk of fallen tree-branch. “One that’s not in hell.”

“Anywhere you wanna go, my love. We’ll paint the town.” His voice was throbbing, fervent.

/My love./ He was saying that more and more often now; slipping it in whenever he thought he could get away with it. It peppered his speech in little, scattered moments, in and amongst the more casual, laid-back ‘luvs’; as if she might round on him and take them away if she actually heard them. /I won’t, though./ Every time he said it, it curled up warm inside her belly and made her want to hug herself, maybe jump on him, maybe just kiss him a lot… Maybe just sit and hold onto it and marvel that he still did. That they had this. 

She wondered if he felt the same way when she called him by his given name. It felt like an endearment to her, when she said it. She wasn’t sure if anything else would ever feel right escaping her lips when it came to him. He was too… fragile in some ways for a diminutive nickname. And, well… she wasn’t really a nickname person, anyway. Never had been. But that—the acknowledgment that she knew who he really was, on the inside, and that she treasured it, would never again want to take advantage or hurt the gentle, loving man in there—it seemed enough.

He could get away with calling her any number of sweet nothings, because she was supposedly ‘the strong one’. And yes. It felt… really nice to have someone around who saw the side of her who wanted that. Who didn’t just see the Slayer, the leader, the general, the sister-mom-authority. The job, the ideal, the icon… or even the friend who was still all those things. 

His dozen tiny endearments meant he saw _her_. Buffy-the-person, for good or ill. They didn’t reduce her. They _held_ her. 

She kind of got the feeling there would be more of them, the longer they spent together and the more he relaxed into the realization that she wasn’t going anywhere. And she found… she was kind of okay with that. 

They topped the low rise, and a vista of gentle downs met their eyes. Dark, billowy; decorated by scatterings of trees and lit by that endless, dim-purple light. The sky was spangled, at the highest point of night, atop the dome and behind the glow, with dozens of brilliant stars sprigging a night like black velvet, with a plum sheen down on one side. “It really is gorgeous here. God, I missed stars.”

“Yeah,” Spike answered, and lifted her hand. Kissed it. Then with a squeeze, dropped it to turn toward the outline of the castle off to the left and barely seen against the low-lit horizon. “Long as it isn’t raining.”

“Killjoy.”

He was already striding off, shoulders tense and vibrating with expectancy. She smiled after him. Terrified or no, he really, really wanted to see Dawn. “She’s probably asleep, you know,” she called after him as she caught up again.

“Sodding teenagers are never asleep before midnight,” he answered, sounding aggrieved at being caught out. “Niblet’ll stay up till five if you let her.”

“Yeah, well, she doesn’t have a TV to keep her company in the courtyard thing.”

That pulled him up short again. “In the what?” he demanded sharply.

“She’s too big to fit inside right now. They’re working on enlarging the entrance to the basement before winter so she’ll have actual quarters—you know, so she won’t freeze to death if it snows—but the way she keeps growing it’s kind of a big project, even for Xander. He’s not used to working with stone; keeps talking about a bunch of stuff I don’t understand. Steel girders and buttressing and stuff. Anyway, they have to make it big in case she gets more massive, and in the meantime she’s been sleeping in this converted stable deal in the old courtyard…”

“Buggering fuck.” Now he was really agitated, his strides lengthening. “Just how tall is the chit?”

“When I pulled her out of Berkeley she was only about ten feet. By the time I left to get you she was, I dunno, fifteen feet or so? No idea if she’s going to stop anytime soon…” It really worried her, actually.

“Bleeding, sodding Christ. We need to find a shaman or some shite to fix this.” She thought she could see the whites of his eyes in the dark. “Red can’t do anything?”

“She hasn’t been back.” It rankled.

His head turned toward her, his long strides eating up the ground. “Don’t you have any other witches about with any power, or…”

“Not really. Andrew said he could summon something that might have enough power, but it might just eat her, so that was kind of out of the question.”

He growled like a thunderstorm, and she hastened to lay out the rest of the options before he exploded. “Giles has been looking into it, I think, but without seeing her…” She bit her lip. “She really hasn’t given us much to go on. She’s being so hush-hush about it that we can’t make heads or tails about the whole situation.”

“Oh, I’ll get it out of her,” Spike growled, sounding like an irate uncle who’d just found out his favorite kid was caught hiding drugs under the bed. Gone was the guy who’d been terrified Dawn was never going to accept him back in her life. “She’ll tell me if I have to drag her back to that bloody uni by her throat. What the bloody hell possessed her to brass off a thricewise so bad that he…”

“To be fair,” Buffy interrupted, “it could just as easily have been Kenny who pissed _her_ off. That’s what has me worried.” The possibility had really been haunting Buffy, actually. “Like… what if he hurt her, and she freaked out on him, and he cursed her to keep her from talking about it? I mean…” She winced a little. “Maybe it’s my own history talking, but it seems like kind of a rude repetition thing that she’s going through something like this after she had her… you know, first night with someone…”

Spike halted again, fists clenching. “If the little pissant hurt her, he’s dead is all. End of story. But to find that out we need to get her talking. And if she can’t tell you, Buffy, she needs to tell somebody.”

/That’s definitely true. And maybe if she can’t talk to me, like I couldn’t talk to Mom… she might talk to you. Like I talked to Giles, when it was Angel./ She could hope so, at least. Considering she’d not only just moved Dawn away from all her girlfriends but literally destroyed the place where they’d all lived. /Well, Spike did, but it comes to the same thing, in the end./ Janice, she was given to understand, had moved Marina Del Rey, and was taking community college courses there. They wrote to each other, but that would so not feel the same, and as for anyone else in her little clique—Kit, Carlos, the ones in the know—not so much. They’d all decided to avoid the world of the weird after the fall of the hellmouth; and that meant avoiding Dawn and her formerly ‘cool’ sister.

And, well, Dawn had learned her lesson back with the Potentials. Between that and some leftover jealousy over the time Buffy had to spend training her ‘sisters in spirit’, Dawn wasn’t exactly trying to buddy up to even the younger Slayers. Not to mention that Buffy herself had been pretty damned busy lately, what with the grief-restlessness, and taking mission after mission abroad to, she realized now, locate her missing Champion; the result being Dawn had become pretty isolated of late. Sometimes she tried to talk to Xander. They had always had a special bond. But Xander… really wasn’t in a place right now where he could exactly _be_ there for much of anyone. /Thank God you’re back, Spike. She _needs_ someone./ 

Right now Buffy honestly didn’t care if it was her. She just wanted Dawn to open up.

The remainder of the walk passed in silence; a furiously ruminative one for Spike and one that, for Buffy, fell to strategizing. /Hopefully they shored up that crumbly part of the southeast wall… Xander and Amina were supposed to have the electronics all set by now… If the PTBs actually like us, they got all the baby Slayers from London and that new, tiny little startup cell down in Brittany up here by now./ She frowned thoughtfully into the night. /Maybe even the ones from Azores. Though I guess them and Barcelona might have gone over to Andrew in Rome. I hope not though. They’re just so not safe that close to Florence. The Scourge might even be late because they took them out first. God./ There was so much to do, so many updates to get…

They topped the last low rise, descended along the verge of the little lake Dawn had been using to bathe, since there wasn’t exactly a giant-sized bathtub around for her anywhere. Approached the bridge to the castle on steadily mushier ground—Buffy had always wondered how castles didn’t literally sink, with all the water around them—and wondered when the sentries would pick them up. /They better be keeping watch, dammit!/ Passed through the last little copse of trees between them and the cleared ground that led to the gatehouse…

 _“There_ you are! Oh my God, I’ve been worried sick about you!”

A massive shadow detached itself from the nearer darkness. Buffy was thrown completely off her stride by the sudden assault of giant-sized Dawn-arms as they basically scooped her up off the ground and hugged her while she dangled somewhere at maybe six feet off the ground. “Oof. Dawn. Hi. I missed you too…” /You have no _idea_ how much…/

She was unceremoniously dropped back to earth, so hard she barely stuck the landing. “How could you just _leave_ like that?” her not-so-little sister demanded, clearly without even noticing that Spike was hovering there off to one side. Which was fair, between the trees and the dark and the being probably almost too tall to notice extraneous persons, and the totally not expecting dead people to show back up in her life. She was also kind of working her way into a lather, which was always a little distracting. “…Just drop off the map for three days; no calls, nothing! Just a, ‘I’ll see you in a little bit, I’ve got something to do?’ What even _is_ that? I’ve been so _worried!_ What could you even have to _do_ when there’s something so _big_ going down up here…” 

She took a breath, giving Buffy time to recognize that her ears were ringing and, she thought, to register just the faintest hint of a chuckle from behind her, from Spike’s stupid ass. But before she could even enjoy the relief, her sister wound up to even greater heights. “And yeah,” she accused, “I heard about this Scourge thing, so you can’t lie to me! Xander was trying to protect me from the Big Bad like I’m a stupid kid still, which, _seriously?_ Oh my God, Buffy; what could you have to do that was so important when we’re all gonna be under attack any time now? What did you do? Run off to Cleveland to see Principal Wood? Because if you’re starting things up again with him I think it’s a terrible id...”

She stopped dead when Spike stepped out from whatever tree he was standing behind to sort of half smile at her. “Hey, Niblet.”  
  
**TBC**  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
*grin*  
I know, I'm cruel.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaand... Spawn!

It was a rare day in the world when Dawn Summers could be reduced to utter, dead silence.

Didn’t last long, of course. “Spike?” It came out in a disbelieving, broken whisper.

“Yeah, it’s me Bit,” he answered softly. “Got myself all magicked back into the land of…” He lifted his arms and dropped them with a self-depreciating flourish. “Well, the mostly living.”

She gaped at him, in a completely and totally satisfactory way. “But you’re dead!” she exclaimed, sounding floored. “Buffy said you burned up!”

“Yeah,” he acknowledged, and shot Buffy a glance through the darkness that clearly read, ‘Help?’

Buffy smiled encouragingly back at him as if to say, ‘You’re doing fine’, but didn’t jump in to save him. To her mind he _deserved_ this little interrogation.

“Oh, sod it.” He turned back to Dawn the way a man faces the guillotine. “It was the amulet, yeah? Apparently it sucked me right up, soul and demon and all, and sent me right off to some kind of limbo. I must’ve got picked up by…” Apparently that was a longer story—and one, for the record, that she still hadn’t heard—since he didn’t go there. “Someone, as I ended up being set free by Angel and his crew. Been in LA for a while…” 

He trailed off when a look of sheer, disbelieving horror slid across Dawn’s face, followed by new flickers of outrage. Buffy fully understood that look. “You mean,” Dawn began slowly, but it started to pick up steam almost immediately, “that you’ve been alive and staying with Angel this _whole_ time while we’ve been over here thinking you were _dead?”_ By the end her pitch was almost higher than bats could hear.

Spike winced a little. “Yeah, well… I didn’t want to interrupt your life, did I?” he answered a little sheepishly. “Yours and Buffy’s. I thought you had set yourselves up real nice, and LA was suiting me alright…”

/Oh, _sure_ it was/ Buffy thought grimly, arms now crossed in memory of that godawful stark apartment, and that grim look she had seen in Spike’s eyes when he’d said he’d had a job to finish.

“…And I didn’t think I should bother you an’ all…” Spike was sputtering on, sounding so much less like his normal, self-assured projection that it was almost comical. Especially when he completely choked off midsentence as Dawn stalked toward him, literal vengeance flashing in her eyes.

“Do you know,” she informed him in a truly frightening voice, and Buffy could not be prouder right now of the way her baby sister was currently making a Master vampire quail, “how many nights I cried myself to sleep thinking of you burning up? How many nights I sat and listened to my sister having _nightmares_ about you? _Screaming_ your name until it woke her up?”

Buffy winced at that. She hadn’t realized she’d woken Dawn up. That she’d been so loud.

Dawn, of course, wasn’t paying attention to the fact that she was telling other people’s secrets right now. She was a steamroller when she was pissed. “Do you know how many times I sat awake listened to her cry because she felt so guilty about letting you _die?”_

/Crap./ She thought she’d been so careful. /Way to out your sister. Jeez./

Her only consolation was watching Spike’s reaction. With each verbal hammer blow her vampire was looking progressively more like he’d been whipped with some kind of invisible flail. Dawn raged on, doling out the punishment and nowhere near at her fill of it. “Do you know what it was like to hear her rocking in there, talking to herself about all the things she didn’t get to say to you before you died, and arguing with your ghost because you told her you didn’t believe her about the things she _did_ say?”

Cue more flinching from the Buffster. /So, I guess I have no secrets left, huh?/ 

At least Spike flinched too, looking more or less as if Dawn had slapped him across the face. Which, _good_. 

“And then we find out that you’ve been _alive_ this whole time,” she went on, voice rising again from low and dangerously vindictive to that penetrating pitch that only Dawn Summers could produce, “just _hanging_ _out_ in LA with Angel and not bothering to tell us that you were all _right_ and that you could have come back _anytime,_ and you just didn’t want to _bother_ us?” By the end of this speech Dawn was at full screech mode, her voice ringing off of the trees and the pond. Buffy, despite half-wanting to cover her ears in self-defense, kind of wanted to cheer for her, because, for realsies, that was about the most accurate assessment she had ever heard of that whole last year.

Spike, she noted, had noticeably paled under the onslaught… which took some doing for a vampire. Hah. “Look, Platelet,” he began, hands held up in self-defense, “I just did what I thought was right. S’pose I just I didn’t think that I...”

/Mattered./ It hurt like hell to realize it, but that was really what it came down to. He had never thought that he mattered enough. /And that was _my_ fault./

“You’re right,” Dawn cut him off fiercely before Buffy, relenting, could come to his defense, “you _didn’t_ think. I don’t know _what_ you were thinking. You’re like the most important big brother I have. Xander’s so out of it you’d think he died too. Tara died, Anya died. Willow’s gone off the map. Giles is off in Russia somewhere… and then _you_ died too! All I’ve had left is Buffy, and she’s been like half a person…”

/Ouch. Dawn, I really _was_ trying./

“…And it’s because of _you.”_ Spike winced again, harder. “What the hell were you _thinking?”_

Despite her half-formed intent to break in and relieve Spike of her sister’s harangue, Buffy found herself incapable of interrupting. She could only watch with fascination, wonder, and no small amount of vindication at the way Spike was floundering; brought to his figurative knees by her baby sister. 

It was kind of amazing to watch. But then, he had a serious weakness for the youngest Summers girl. He’d had a weakness for all of the Summers women, actually, from the start. She wasn’t sure what it was about her family, but they were obviously Spike’s kryptonite. And Dawn really took the cake when it came to power they had over him. “I guess I wasn’t thinking much, Platelet,” he finally broke in humbly, and spread his hands, looking at her now with little more than an abject need for absolution. “I was in my feelings, yeah? Didn’t know what to do except stay away and try to prove myself.”

That only riled Dawn up more. _“Prove_ yourself?” she demanded. _“Prove_ yourself? You already _died_ to save the whole freaking _world_ , Spike! What more did you need to _do?”_

/Hear, hear!/ Even though she knew what Spike meant, that he had needed to prove he could be a good man without the impetus of a would-be lover as inspiration, Buffy was about ready to give her kid sister a parade along about now. Mostly just on the strength of her sheer, withering takedown of the timescale involved.

Spike was clearly suitably chastened. “Can we just let it go, Bit?” he asked a little plaintively. “Maybe give me a hug and tell me you’re glad I’m back?”

Dawn folded her arms across her chest, the picture of teenage frustration. “Maybe when I’m done being mad at you.” And then only about three seconds later she was flinging herself toward him in the darkness, her large face cracking into tears. “Oh my God, _Spike!”_

It was kind of crazy to watch Dawn, who had already been this gangling thing but who had clearly always found comfort in the vampire, try to fold herself around Spike now as a giant and yet still somehow attempt to burrow into him like a puppy. It was somewhat like watching a young apple tree try to hug a very small but extremely beloved gardener. 

“Niblet,” Spike grunted in a muffled way from somewhere around the general vicinity of her navel, “you’re a mite stronger than me right now.”

“Oh! Sorry,” she exclaimed, and released him as abruptly as she had attacked. “I’m just so glad to _see_ you!”

“Yeah,” he answered sardonically, “that’s the gist of what I got from your sister, once she got over being brassed off at me. You’re good as a pair, you Summers women.”

“Yeah, I guess sometimes we’re not that different,” Buffy answered with a faint smile, and uncrossed her arms. “Have to admit, right now Dawn’s going to have to get the award for the more eloquent of the two of us.” She was rewarded for that when her sister flashed her a blinding—and large—smile. 

“I’ve always been the eloquent one.”

“When she’s not being a jerk,” Buffy amended blandly.

That earned her her own share of Dawnie-glares. “Seriously, though. Would it have killed you to call me and let me know that he was alive?”

/Okay, but…/ “We had a lot going on,” she answered gravely, and shot her chastened lover a pointed look. “First I had to convince him that I loved him and he should come back with me, which took some doing because you know Spike… and then LA fell into a hell dimension and we spent almost five months living there trying to find our way back.” Spike drew even with her as she said it, till they were standing shoulder-to-shoulder; the united front and solid, unassailable unit they had become during that half a year in hell. Dawn, she saw from the corner of her eye, was gaping at them, but in that instant she had eyes only for the man who had turned her world upside down and inside out… and made it all make sense. “Luckily all of that happened inside of some crazy time-loop, so we didn’t lose more than a couple of days by the time it was all over…”

“Wait; what?” Dawn interrupted, sounding stunned. “LA did what?” Buffy opened her mouth to answer, but never got the opportunity. “No; wait. Actually, don’t tell me about that yet. First,” and she clapped her hands together and looked at the two of them with what could only be described as sheer glee held back by thread of uncertainty. “Are… you two together again?”

Buffy had thought about this all the way back. All of the things she should say; about how she had to think about what kind of example she was setting for her sister, and about that one night, and what it might tell Dawn about what she should accept, and shouldn’t, and…

And the problem was… it was complicated. By magick and souls and demons and mutual abuse and forgiveness and absolution and chances and… It was a lot more complicated than just never. 

She would just have to make sure Dawn really understood. 

She could feel the uncertainty as Spike’s hand slipped down to fumble with hers. She took it firmly. “Yeah, we are,” she answered simply, because the rest… could wait. 

And the blood flowed between them like life.

“Oh my gosh; I’m so _excited!”_ Dawn swung around to pin Spike with a stare that was as demanding as any teenager could get. “Are you staying?”

“If you’ll have me,” he answered quietly. “I know you’ll have to put up with a few inconveniences, but Buffy sounds like she thinks it’ll be worth it, so if you are too, then…”

“Oh, yes, oh my _God!”_ she squealed, and lunged toward them to sort of scoop them both up. It was an attempt at a hug, though all she really managed to do was kind of knock their heads together and squish them within an inch of their lives. But then she pulled back abruptly, looking confused. “But what about…” She faltered and looked abruptly deeply uncertain, eyes on Buffy.

/And there it is./ The moment of truth. Buffy shook her head, well-aware of what her sister was thinking about. “That’s in the past,” she answered quietly. Felt Spike tense beside her, his hand tightening in hers. Squeezed it back to quiet him. “Part of another life. _And_ , there’s more than enough blame on both sides when it comes to things like that between the two of us.” There would be more to discuss, when it came to that; later. Without Spike. But for now…

Dawn nodded and looked away, willing for the moment to accept whatever Buffy said at face value. “Okay…” She threw herself down on the ground with an earthshaking thump, so that her legs spread out across almost the entirety of the available tree-free space, and regarding them both with her chin on her cupped palms. “Now. What’s this about LA falling into hell?”

***

They managed to convince Dawn that it would be better for them to get nominally inside the structure before they recounted the whole saga. Maybe get some sleep first, since it was local midnight, though neither of them were really tired. Stupid jet-lag. “Might try for a bit of kip, anyway,” Spike allowed, though from his speculative, almost-doubtful look at the sky it was clear that just this little skip through time zones might be the thing that ended up nudging him back to nocturnal. 

Consequently, they headed over the bridge toward the gate as a wildly mismatched trio, Dawn obligingly carrying Spike’s suitcase under one arm like it was a small purse as she tromped heavily ahead of them. It gave them a moment’s space to regroup before the final reckoning. 

Spike spent it mostly in silence, then, just as they had reached the end of the footbridge, “You really cried?”

It came out quietly, amazed, like he absolutely couldn’t believe that she would shed tears over him. /Are you really that dumb?/ “I tried not to where anyone could see. I was all strong and silent in the daytime. I got it out of my system by taking the worst away missions.” She looked away a little, exhaled wearily. “You know… once I got past the first month, with the random fogs where I completely checked out without realizing it about every ten, fifteen minutes, because all I could see in my mind was a huge empty crater and you, burning, telling me over and over again that you didn’t believe me, and wondering if maybe I’d’ve just stayed, or crawled back down, or…”

She trailed off, tried an awkward shrug.

Dead silence, then, “Christ, I’m that sorry, Slayer.” Shame dripped from his voice.

/Yeah, well./ “You were incorporeal for most of that part, I guess. By the time you got your body back I kind of mostly had my shit together again. Except, you know. At night. When I always dreamed about you.”

“Buffy…”

Shaking it off, she grabbed his hand and dragged him up over the edge of the boards. /A, not your fault, with those stupid Powers screwing with us. B… Even without Them, probably… All that time with Angel there, messing with your head… I know how that works. And you paid for it. For not coming to me. It was probably like… purgatory or something; months spent trapped there in that hellhole with your abuser, trying to figure out how to fix a relationship you probably never could. And maybe it’s better now, a little, but it’s always gonna be a mess… and you took that, too, like some kind of willing punishment for all your sins. Because you’re a dope. So how can I be mad about anything but lost time, when we were both in our own hells?/ “It’s over, now.” There were noises ahead; faint echoes of call-and-response. Their progress had apparently finally seen and reported by someone useful. /Note to self to get on the guard detail about being severely sloppy./

Whoever was on watch tonight, the messenger service was at least on task, for they were met at the gateway by a familiar figure. 

Xander always looked about ten years older every time Buffy saw him after a long absence. Just the way he stood, slightly hunched and deeply weary, like the world was wearing him down. He definitely didn’t look like a guy her own age anymore, and his face, as they drew closer and the lights mounted on the walls touched them, had too many lines for someone in his early twenties. He needed to shave, had a couple of gray hairs starting already here and there up front… It hurt to look at him. And it wasn’t just because of the eye-patch. /One of my best friends; and look what following me has done to him./ 

“Xander, look who’s here!” Dawn, of course, was bubbling at him the minute she came close; the polar opposite of the prematurely-aged man. 

“Yeah, hey, Buff.” His voice even seemed colorless lately; as if it was too much work to lift inflection to it. “Where you been? We were afraid you weren’t gonna make…”

He trailed off then, single eye widening in shock. It was the first real expression Buffy had seen from him in over a year, unless you counted the wave of renewed grief he’d experienced when he’d come out from under his thrall to Dracula. Clearly he’d caught sight of their new addition, the way he’d blanched. “Woah. _Spike?”_

She had been worried this entire time; about a lot of things, when it came to Xander. That he might be mad that she had gotten her guy back and Anya was still dead. That it was _Spike_ , since he had always had issues with that particular vampire. Well, really, _any_ vampire she dated, but especially Spike, and especially after that night in the bathroom. Which, admittedly, hadn’t been any of his damn business, and she really wished he had never even heard about that. And she really, really wished he’d never told Dawn his version of it—certainly before Buffy could tell her own—but what was done was done. 

She expected any number of things to come out of his mouth; some of the above, maybe all of the above, and most of it bitter. But what did come out was, “Are you a ghost? Wait. Can vamps ghost? I mean, you have a soul, so I guess half of you can, but the demon… doesn’t it go straight to hell? I mean…”

/Okay, so we’re gonna go the nerd route instead?/ Sometimes Alexander Harris still managed to surprise her.

“Interesting theory,” Spike answered, and eyed Buffy thoughtfully. “You know, that might explain a lot. I die, the soul wants to go one way, the demon’s s’posed to go the other, I get caught right in the middle and sucked into the amulet. Bam. Out I come the other side, because no one knows quite what the bloody hell to do with me.”

It didn’t fit one single little bit with her own personal theory, but she didn’t care much right now as long as Xander wasn’t choosing this moment to have a sudden revival of emotions in the general direction of pissiness or rage. “Good point,” she answered with a faint smile. “Especially since now we’ve been to hell we know this is a better limbo state for vampires either way.”

Hell? What? Hey! Clueless guy still over here!” Xander waved at them to break in. “So… what happened? Something about the amulet? It sent you to hell?” 

Dawn was bouncing on her very large heels. “No, I think that was later. And he’s totally not a ghost. No ghostage. I hugged him. He hugged me.” She squished Spike again, pinning him hard to her side and making him grunt, and bounced again, squeezing a little.

“Oi! Take it easy, Niblet!”

“Sorry!” She released him, still beaming madly over all their heads. “But yeah! He’s alive again!”

Xander’s eye sought Buffy’s, begging for a reasonable explanation. 

“The amulet got shipped off to Wolfram and Hart somehow,” she explained quietly. /Which is still part of the story I really need to hear from someone at some point./ “…And it zapped him out of it a little while later. He’s been hanging around helping Team Angel ever since. They’ve actually still been fighting the good fight, believe it or not…”

“Huh. Could’ve fooled us…”

Spike made a twisted face. There was a lot behind that, most of it in a sinking lockbox labeled ‘Fred’. She moved on quickly. “I found out when I called Angel to ask him about some stuff the Scourge said, and went down there…” She decided the short version was better for right now. “Some things went down that delayed us. We’ll tell you about all the hell part later. But here we are.”

“Ready to serve,” Spike added in briskly.

Xander pondered that for only like five seconds. “Oh. Wow. Well. I’m actually… kinda glad.” 

“Yeah?” Spike sounded truly surprised by this reception. Honestly, Buffy was too.

Xander cut his eye to Spike’s. “Yeah, you know. World-saveage and all that. No one can argue you’re not part of the team after that, right?” He returned his gaze briefly to Buffy with a sad sort of half-smile before he looked away again, down at the hammer he held in his hand; an indication that he hadn’t been sleeping at all. Working. Working because he still couldn’t sleep. “If I had the chance to go get _my_ demon back, God knows I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

/Oh, man./ 

Beside her, Spike grunted with a sound like impact. Buffy had told him about Anya in Hell-A. It had hit him hard. He’d liked her, obviously. But from the sound of it, he was even more startled to hear the way the loss had affected Xander.

“Xan…”

Xander lifted his unoccupied hand. “No. I’m alright, it’s just…” His eye rose again, took them in. “You guys… back. Together?” It was broken up oddly, as if it were two separate questions. 

She held her breath a little, because here was the tricky part. “Yeah. Which…” She really didn’t want him coming after Spike or her with any further questions about the past and how she could even consider getting back together with Spike after et cetera et cetera, had a whole preemptive thing ready to jump in, but she never got the chance. 

“I mean… yeah. I… If I had a chance to try again, there’re things I’d like a do-over on.” He shrugged. “Kind of washes away all the past, doesn’t it. The dying. The death. And the… wishing you could have just another day.”

“It does.” He just sounded so tired. So beaten by life that it broke her heart.

“So, are we gonna go in?” Dawn asked, clearly trying hard to change the subject. “Spike and Buffy were just about to tell me about how LA fell into a hell-dimension and they were stuck there for, like, _months_ …”

Xander started at that, looking like an astonished, one-eyed owl. “LA fell who with what, now?”

“It’s kind of a long story,” Buffy answered, and shot Spike a quick glance. “We’ve been trying to convince Dawn it can maybe wait for tomorrow…”

“When you’ll all be in strategy meetings, and then there’ll probably be a battle, and I’ll never get to _hear_ it…”

Xander looked a little torn, then he sighed heavily. “Not that I’ll probably sleep anyway, but I’m all ‘Watcher-guy and responsible adult’, so I should try. Battle coming and all that.” He frowned down at his shoes. “Maybe I’ll hear it tomorrow.” His gaze jerked back up to meet theirs; Buffy first, then Spike. “Long as it isn’t something I need to know right now?”

“Probably not,” Spike answered kindly, with a quick glance at Buffy. She shrugged. 

“Kay.” 

There were a few things Buffy needed to know, or she wouldn’t sleep either. “Xan. The Barcelona cell here? Azores? Or did they go to Rome?” /Please say no.../

That earned her a startled look. “Nah. I mean, we have Brittany of course, but yeah. They both went there, and then Andrew picked them all up and headed to Russia. You know him and Giles and their mutual admiration society.” Xander shrugged. “I think little man has a serious crush.”

“Well, Giles is crushable.”

Her comment brought about the desired goal. Xander’s head jerked up, eye coming back to the present to glare at her in disbelief. “I’m just gonna forget you said that.”

/Win./

Spike, of course, growled in equal disbelief. “We're all gonna forget she said that.”

/Dork./ Understandable, considering recent history, but still. The comment hadn’t been for his benefit.

Xander shrugged a little, sinking immediately back into the blues. “Well… Guess I should crash; or try. Glad you’re back safe, Buffster.” Shook his head a little at Spike, sounding distantly surprised, still. “Spike’s back. Huh.” Shot a sad little half-smile at Dawn. “Catch you tomorrow, Dawnie.” And turning, he headed back into the gatehouse, tread slow and heavy.

Spike frowned, watching this retreat, then turned thoughtful eyes on Buffy as they followed his steps along the last of the narrow causeway and past the crappy excuse for a moat (really it was just a bunch of sludgy rainwater at the bottom of a ditch). “Not doing so hot, is he?”

Dawn sighed heavily ahead of them, a worried exhalation strong enough that it echoed under the gatehouse as she passed under it. Buffy bit back her own sigh as she answered. “Anya dying kind of broke him.”

“Yeah. I get that. Not so chuffed about losing her either; she was the hell of a brilliant bird.” He looked ahead of them, into the dilapidated castle. “Never thought I’d see the day when he’d just welcome me back with open arms like that, though. ‘Wash away the past’ and all that rot. He didn’t throw a single thing in my face.”

They were nearing the arch. It was technically a public housing situation, but it had been warded and deeded to a ‘society’ under her control, so just in case, Buffy murmured a, “Come in, Spike,” under her breath. Caught his swift, warm look, the tiny squeeze of her hand that said ‘Thanks’. She’d have to say it for sure at their bedroom, but clearly he was invited there.

She glanced up at his face as they passed out of the purple light. The sharp relief of it faded, his every feature sliding into gloom, so that all she could make out was his shock of pale hair just above her head. “Yeah, I know,” she went on, returning to the suspended subject of Xander. “It’s… kind of worrying me, actually.”

His head turned toward her, hair a beacon in the dark, and she knew by his tone that he was frowning after their vanguard. “Bit refreshing, though. Boy’s grown up.” 

/I’m not sure I’d call it that./ 

They passed through the other side of the mossy, mildew-smelling arch, emptied out into the wide courtyard where the baby Slayers practiced. It was quiet, of course, at this time of night as they crossed toward the converted stable-deal Dawn used for a house right now. And how much did it suck that that was all she could really offer her younger sister in the way of housing?

That social worker from way back would seriously have a cow.

***

“Wow.” Dawn’s eloquent Summers summary of events was fairly par for the course. She was still watching Spike like he was the second coming from where she was leaning back against the oaken tack-cupboard that served them as a makeshift couch, her legs sprawled out before them on the ancient, cobblestone floor. “I mean, that's amazing.”

“It was a long four-and-a-half months,” Buffy agreed. /None of it with you very far away./ She trailed her fingers down over the edge of the bench into Spike’s hair and played there, enjoying the new-washed softness of it under the gel. Felt the low rumble of his almost-inaudible purr beginning; a reverberation that ran through her fingertips, into the marrow of her bones to echo in her very being. Cells of the bloodstream. Chambers of the heart. Like she was an instrument he was playing, or he was one she played, or... maybe both.

Staying in constant contact was a thing, now they were back in ‘the real world’, with all its uncertainty. You’d think the other dimension would have been the uncertain one, but there had been things they had taken for granted here that they would have to fight for in this one.

Spike had moved down to the cold-ass floor at some point in the narrative in order to sit next to Dawnie; probably out of that instinct he had to keep her company. He had always recognized in her little sister the loneliness of another adrift soul, his having been one himself. Isolated even among the crowds. 

He was good at that; had done it with her, too. And yes, she was glad he had done it. Clearly it was making Dawn happy, the way she kept looking over at him with all that awed joy, but… Buffy really missed his presence at her side. /You can share your vampire/ she rebuked herself silently. /Let Dawn have him back for a while too./

That was the other thing. Call her greedy, but she hadn’t had to share him, there. Here…

She had missed the hell out of her sister. But whatever her brave words to the contrary on the flight over, she was really going to have to work to get used to not having Spike all to herself. /Just stop it. The last time you tried to make him only yours you ended up completely isolating him. It was totally unfair and cruel, and he just told you what family means to him./ 

/He’s not going anywhere. We’re not going anywhere. There’ll be plenty of time./ 

Knowing it intellectually was one thing. Trusting it, of course, was entirely another. Hence the touching. “Actually, I just now realized it was basically the same amount of time as our first…” /Can we even call that a relationship? What we had before?/

Spike’s head tilted back slightly to eye her with interest. His beautiful blues glinted in the dim light from the mechanic’s bulb on its extension cord, hanging from a hook on a beam overhead. “Never thought about it that way. Bit like karma of a sort, that. Balancing the bloody scales.”

“Yeah.” Something warm slipped in over Buffy’s heart. It felt like wounds being healed. The redressing of mutual pains. “Does that mean we…” /Did we fix it? Did we make the most of our second chance to get it right?/

Spike’s left hand slipped up along the edge of the wooden bench to brush hers where her fingers dangled over the ledge. Their hands fumbled. Locked together briefly. “Yeah,” he answered. Hoarse. Certain.

/Thank God./ “Alright,” she answered, and bit her lip to keep the raw thing in her throat from overtaking everything. 

After a moment she realized her right hand had gone still in his hair, and recommenced her rummaging caresses. Spike closed his eyes promptly to resume his low, subsonic vampire purr, and everything went back to station-keeping. 

“Do you always have conversations where you don’t finish your sentences?”

“Huh?” Buffy blinked her eyes open to regard her sister in confusion. Dawn was watching them with an expression of incomprehension, which didn’t make a single bit of sense. All sentences had been completed as far as she could recall. Hadn’t they?

“Never mind. Okay. So… You just, what? Said bye to Angel forever, stole his jet, and came here? After he died in your arms?”

Spike huffed a little, sounding aggrieved. Buffy rolled her eyes at the back of his head. “Angel knows where we stand. It’s why he let us _borrow_ the plane…” 

“Might not give the damn thing back. Bleedin’ tosser…” 

Buffy shook her head and tugged a little at his hair to tell him to behave. Of course, all that did was make him stretch out all sensuously and throw her a smirk that promised all sorts of filthy entertainment if she was going to keep making with the foreplay, because he was twisted. And no, she was not getting warm from that look. No siree. 

“I guess it’s just kind of a surprise,” Dawn was saying, apparently oblivious to the vibe, thank god. “I mean, he’s been basically stringing you along for years, and you always seemed to keep going for it whenever he came back to town, no matter how much it messed you up or made you crazy…”

“Bloody amen…”

If she pulled his hair again he’d treat it like a stupid reward. Dumb vampire. 

Dawn turned her eyes to focus on Buffy, expression surprisingly approving. “I’m glad you finally told him it was over. I’m proud of you.”

Buffy blinked, nonplussed. Since when was a younger sister supposed to get to say that to her older sister who raised her through half of her teenagehood, dammit? “Thanks,” she managed finally, wryly. 

Dawn looked down at her very large hands and shrugged. “It makes me feel better. I was worried. You know, watching how long it was taking you to get past… stuff. With him.” 

Buffy straightened up, holding her breath. “Well,” she slipped it in carefully, “first love can really affect you. Especially when it’s all wrapped up in all those other firsts. Sometimes it takes a while to get over all of that and move on. And when something goes wrong, or…” She could tell Spike had ceased breathing as well to wait hopefully. After all, opening or no, this was like walking through a minefield. Any second Dawn could snap shut like a clam. “It doesn’t matter who’s fault it is that things got crazy or went sideways… you still feel like you have to make up for it. Pay for it somehow. But it’s not true, Dawn. People are just people. We live our lives, and we wake up the next day and try again.”

Dawn didn’t exactly clam up. She did nod a little, which was something, but then finally only shrugged again, this time dismissively. “People can really disappoint other people,” she murmured quietly.

Spike leaned in toward her, taking up the baton without need for Buffy’s silent urging. “Niblet, no one here’s disappointed, if that’s what you mean.” He shot Buffy a quick, slightly panicked look, got an approving nod from her in return. “You wanna talk about it?”

Silence, and then she looked over. Faced Spike down in the low light from the clip-on bulb. Opened her mouth… And stared, blinking. Bent over, peering closer at his face, as if she had only just really seen him well from up at her high angle. “Spike,” she breathed, sounding startled, “are you wearing eyeliner?”

/Oh, hell./ There went that opportunity. Dawn, teen to the bone, had seized on the best possible distraction, and was running with it like it was a football or something.

Spike groaned and shot Buffy a look that said, ‘I tried.’ “Yeah, why?” he replied then, a little defensively.

Dawn must have read his tone well enough, because she hastened to correct his misapprehension. “No, I mean, it looks way good on you, I just never...”

Keeping her hand moving through his hair, Buffy felt the smile return to her lips. /It’s alright, William. We’ll try again later./ “Doesn't it, though?” 

Caught by her tone, Spike tilted his head back on the edge of the bench to eye her with interest. “Oh, yeah? Like that, is it? And you never told me.”

“Well, I'm telling you now.” Removing her hand from its station in his hair with some regret, Buffy crossed her arms. “Didn't want you to get a big head... but now I'm thinking I don’t know if I want you to stop, either.”

His riveted look was interrupted by Dawn's sally. “You so shouldn't. I mean, I never thought of you wearing makeup, but...” She looked him up and down, assessing, and crossed her arms in copy of Buffy’s posture. “Yeah. It _really_ works.”

Spike started, wincing. “Alright, stop that, Niblet. You're not allowed to look at me like that.”

“Why?” she challenged, brow lifted.

That actually made him splutter. “Because it's... weird,” he protested, totally nonplussed.

God, this was fun. How had she never noticed how truly entertaining it was to watch her baby sister completely throw Spike for a loop? And she did it so damned _easily!_

“It's not weird,” Dawn was saying all matter-of-factly. “I had a crush on you _way_ before you got with Buffy.” She frowned, giving the impression of counting in her head. “At least I think so.”

/Huh. The more you know./

All uncertainty passed from her sister like the Santa Anas on a cool night as she moved on in typical Dawn fashion. “So that means I have dibs on telling you if you're cute or not in eyeliner.” The last was tossed off with complete, breezy Dawn Summers pronouncement status, like it was a matter of pure logic and there was absolutely no point in gainsaying it.

“Buffy... Speak to her, will you?” At this point Spike sounded so pained he was practically plaintive. 

Obviously it was time to take pity on him before he cracked. “Dawn, stop needling Spike. He's had a hard month.”

“A hard bloody year,” Spike muttered to himself, looking harried. “Is this what I have to look forward to? Caught in between the hammer and the anvil with two mad Summers women?”

“Too late to back out now,” Buffy informed him briskly, and dropped her hand back to its seat in his hair. “My receipt says paid in full, no returns after hell.”

He shot her a faintly glare-y look. “No returns after first bloody sight is more like, and you know it.” His gaze turned rueful and he leaned his head back against the bench and surrendered to her touch. “It just took me a bit to bring the ownership papers up to registration.”

Her hand paused, slid down briefly so that the backs of her fingers could brush his neck. Felt him shiver at the caress. Then she was back up, her fingers playing lightly in his newly-emerging curls. Triumph. “Samesies.”

She didn’t even realize they were being watched until an announcement broke through the bubble. “You two are cute and gross. I’m going to go get some milk to wash down all the adorable.” Despite her protestations Dawn sounded cheerful as she shoved herself to her oversized feet and slouched over to the one side of the stable, where a small fridge was plugged into an extension cord.

“Not too much calcium, yeah, till we can get you back right-sized?” Spike called after her. He jerked when Buffy gave his hair another admonitory tug. “What? She's clearly doing bloody great with growin’ her long bones. No need to give any help.”

/Yeah. But it’s not like she wasn’t tall enough already without help./ “What are we gonna do about this giant thing?” Buffy murmured anxiously, now her sister was out of earshot.

“Dunno.” Spike, too, stared after her, clearly concerned. “Should've worn off by now, I reckon, not still be keepin’ on.”

Just another damn thing. “Well, maybe if we survive this Scourge attack we can ask Giles if he's found anything yet.” Not that she wanted yet another reason to have to go face down her ex-Watcher, but...

“Yeah.” He too sighed. With good reason, she knew, considering the bad blood there. “Rupert may be a right wanker, but he knows his magicks.” Which was a hell of a concession from him considering when Giles had tried to have him killed he had done it in cold blood; a logical decision from the logical Watcher, not some kind of hot-blooded and impulsive ‘Ripper’ move. 

And after all they’d been through as nominal as allies, to boot. 

God, when did everything get so twisted? And why did re-entry into their real lives seem so hard, when hell had seemed so comparatively simple?

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
So...  
There we are then.   
We have returned. 'Reality' will come crashing in in the morn.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, so I have a confession to make. I got into a kind of a thing when I put in a quote at the beginning of this story. I started liking the idea. So... I backtracked and put a few quotes in elsewhere; namely, at the beginnings of each of the preceding tales. Just a little flavor-text, as it were, to match up with this one. Just at the beginnings, though. This one, on the other hand, will have quotes at the beginning of each separate "section", since it doesn't have big divisions (like Hell-A did, since that one covered whole months). 
> 
> Anyhoo, that's my mea culpa for anyone who wants to flash back to the preceding 'chapter ones' to glance at any forgoing quotes to see what cleverness I located to match stories to things famous people have said in the past. Yadda.

_“And in order to fight the good fight, we have to engage, we have to get into the ring, not just stand outside it and be philosophers.”_

* * *

**S:  
**  
They finally did manage to get some kip in, somewhere about three in the morning. He even cashed his chips in for a bit, though he’d honestly rather just spend the hours watching Buffy lie safe against him and breathe her peace. Enjoy the gift that was still precious and new, even after months, of a Buffy who allowed him to hold her in his arms… and be close. Just for this last little bit; these last few hours that were theirs and theirs alone.

He was going to have to give her back. Back to the world. Right fucking bitter pill, that, after having her all to himself for the last damn near half a year. No sodding Calling. Her able to pick and choose her battles, even when it had weighed on her; or just stay with him, give herself some surcease, and let him offer it. Allow herself to take it from him in a place where she could say, in all honesty and looking dead into his eyes, that there at least… she had been _his_ , too.

It wouldn’t be so, here. Here, she was the world’s first, his second. He knew it, of course. Had always known. There would be the strategy meetings, the bleeding battles and the like, and that was all fine. They’d had all that in hell. But there he had been her equal, and they a solid, uncompromising team. Here, of course, she was the Slayer. A fucking monument, a goddamned institution. The first, the One, the ultimate. They would all look to her. With all they would have to fight to keep any part of their carefully-carved gray areas and the middle-ground they had claimed between them, it was meet that he step back a bit, take up his old role. To be the man who got to remind her that someone knew, at least, there was a woman underneath the Calling, and just be grateful he got to be the one as got to take care of her. 

In the face of all that was coming, Spike would take what he could get whenever she might be free; and anyway, better part of valor that he not make it any harder on her, when she was giving so much of herself to him in order that they could continue to be what they had built. Christ, it was more than he had ever thought he would have of her anyway, to be second. To be here at all. He’d no reason to resent it. To regret.

He would take it and glad, of course. Had no problem being her helpmeet; didn’t give a fig for rot like fucking gender roles. He celebrated her power, and god knew it turned him on like nothing else to watch her in all her glory; as leader, as fighter, as warrior. He celebrated, too, those moments when her quieter strength showed through. Her insistence on holding up those weaker than herself. On taking them in and shoring them up. On taking a chance on the broken and the questionable ones. Her ability to see past what she’d been taught, and find the shades of gray she had never known existed. For a bird who’d had to be so bloody hard all her life, the fact that she could yield at all, was still fighting to remake herself in the face of all the fucking storms life kept throwing at her was a phenomenon. 

Christ, he loved watching her strength when she let herself _feel_ , after all that. When she let herself break, quietly, in those moments when they were alone, and she opened up the soul behind those fierce hazel-green eyes. The precious gift of those rare moments when she left off hugging herself and asked him, wordless, to hold her instead, never failed to astound him. Did she even know what kind of insane fortitude it required to do that, after all she’d seen?

He just bloody loved her, and that was all of it. He’d do whatever she needed, be whatever she wanted, so long as he might stay.

Didn’t mean it wasn’t soddin’ difficult to step back. But. “You go on, Slayer. I’ll hang back.”

She halted mid-stride when her tugging hand met resistance. Turned to stare at him, her eyes on his surprised and newly uncertain. “No reason you shouldn’t come too. You’re a part of the team. They need to know that…”

He agreed easily, but waved his hand about his head. “Need to get the lay of the land first, yeah? Make sure I know my way around this heap without ending up ashes. What if I’m on my way down to this meeting of yours, and I walk into a stray ray of sunlight…”

She shot him a knowing glare. “I’m pretty sure after a hundred-plus years you’ve learned how to jump back away from the windows. I think it’s more important that we introduce you to the girls. You know, before something dire happens.”

He nodded, accepting this. “Vamp and that, hangin’ about the place. Might ought to make an announcement, I suppose, before I have to fight off the whole lot of bitty Slayers.” He waggled his brows at her. “Don’t wanna hurt the children.”

She was watching him now as if he were a book she was in the midst of reading and she had come across a turning point she hadn’t at all predicted. “They’re shaping up alright, Spike. Take them seriously. More than two or three of them at once and you might have your hands full.”

That she could give him such a compliment with a straight face filled him up, sure. Granted he was on her blood laid over the top of what he'd had before that battle—seemed like sodding years ago—and a nice capper on the plane. Clearly he had honed his skills through years of exposure to the best, since Christ knew fighting with and beside Buffy for all this time had to have rubbed off a bit, made him better than he had been. But the fact remained, he was still a vamp and they, Slayers. That she had such confidence in him as to think he could handle three of the chits—infants or no—on his own, was a hell of an accolade. “Maybe I’ll offer myself up as sparring partner again, yeah? Make myself useful?”

She warmed; enough that he scented her, and he fought back a groan as she stepped in closer to him; got right in his bloody face. “I’m not sure I want to share you, Spike. I think maybe sparring with you might be an all-mine kind of thing.”

Fuck, she made a man want to fall to his knees and worship. Sodding Goddess incarnate. “We all gotta do our parts,” he informed her, and manfully resisted the urge to adjust the stiffy making itself less-than-useful in his goddamned too-tight trousers.

She tilted her head for a second, as if she were a hawk and he a mouse… and then, eyes flaring, she planted her hands, one on each of his shoulders, and shoved him hard, bodily, against the corridor wall. “Slayers, Spike, not Potentials. If any one of them gets you on the ground, I might get upset.”

Alright, so he was bloody easy too, but it was a vision that promptly got him even more… agitated. His golden goddess, wrath incarnate as she drove in to knock aside some careless chit who’d got in a lucky strike. Pulling him up right there in the middle of the courtyard they’d crossed yesterday, and having him up against the wall or summat to prove to herself that he was alive and well, and _hers_. Christ knew she had no problem shagging him out of his mind in public, given inspiration enough… and between watching him spar with another Slayer and her near-constant fear of losing him, she might just do it.

His prick was going to strangle itself in his jeans.

She wasn’t fooled, of course. Yanked his head down hard against her mouth, and fuck, he was done. Always was, when she took him over like this. Lost himself in her, forgot what they were talking about, forgot everything but her body pressing him hard to the wall. The force of her, thrumming with power against his ribs, his cock, his thighs, the tight bands of her matchless arms around his neck. The almost vicious grip of her fingers roaming up his nape, driving into his hair; the fierceness of her incredibly possessive mouth. Slayer of the Slayers, defeated long since by a pair of burning, verdant eyes and the randiest bloody mouth on the planet; and he was surely owned. 

When she pulled away he stood there for probably far too long, hands splayed against the cold, sweating stone wall, successful mostly only in keeping his balance. Keeping his hands there helped in the task at hand, which was, to wit, not dragging her bodily back into her room—or rather, he supposed, their room now. What a thought—and throwing her back down on the bed for a fast but satisfying passage at arms. “Best get to your meeting, pet, before I decide shagging you witless is a much better use of your time.”

She sighed heavily. “You sure you’re not coming?”

/Well… might have to have a wank, now, but as to this meeting…/ “Buffy,” he told her, and let his voice drop into the sincere register that meant ‘just you and me’. “You need to re-establish dominance without me, yeah? Right from the outset, so that when they see you with me later, they won’t question it.” And at her slightly cynical look he smirked back, because yeah. Probably a bit of wishful thinking involved in that. Still. “As much?” he tried finally.

Her mouth twitched in irritation as she considered that future battle, but she conceded the point. “Nest politics?”

“Well… Territorial bints, yeah? Could see some other bird jockeying for the top spot, do you fall out of favor.”

Something flickered in her eyes that he couldn’t read; something tired. She lifted her hand to his cheek, then let it drop away. “Where will you be?” And her eyes flashed again, sharp warning. _“Not_ sparring.”

He shifted a little, cock still unconscionably hard. “All yours when it comes to that. You wanna loan me out, I’ll wait till you give the word.”

Her eyes dropped to his crutch, and a smile touched her lips. “You keep reacting like that every time we even mention the word, and you’re not going to be decent company for any of these defenseless girls.”

He rolled his eyes at her. “Don’t be stupid, Slayer. You know that’s only for you.”

“Better be.” Moving away, she glanced down the hall. “I’ll bring you up first, so you can move around without too much hassle.” Her gaze jerked back to him, a hopeful light flickering briefly there. “Maybe you can get Dawn talking? She was so _close_ , last night.”

“Yeah, she was.” It troubled him. “See what I can do, pet, but if she doesn’t wanna share, it’s not like I can force her. What we’ve got’s still new, yeah?”

“Yeah, don’t wreck it. But…” Shaking her head, Buffy made a clear effort to let it go. “I’ll see you later?”

How was that even in question? “Always, Love.”

He watched her march off down the hallway; a purposeful, almost martial figure, bearing once more on her shoulders all those cares she had shed in their time together in Hell-A. /I love you so bloody much, Buffy./

He’d need to take care of his little problem before he set about wandering the halls. Would help keep his mind on business, as he’d need to be on the alert for the warning _frisson_ that was ‘Slayer-not-Buffy’. If there was any goodwill in the universe for him, or if he’d done enough to get on the sodding PTBs’ good side, Xander would have put up a bulletin or somesuch before the morning had come on, letting the denizens know there was a friendly vamp wandering about. Still, it had been the better part of valor for him to wait a bit for the meeting to start and word to get out before he went poking his head into too many off-limits areas. Knowing Buffy, she would do as she said she might, and make that bit her first priority in the meeting. Something along the lines of, ‘Alright, before we start, put the word out. I’ve brought back an ally. He’s a vampire. This is what he looks like. If any woman here tries to dust him she’ll answer to me.’

He knew how his bird sounded when she had her uncompromising voice on. Bloody terrifying. And wholly magnificent, of course. They’d all sit up and take notice. And whatever their protests, she’d brook no opposition. 

She never had, when it came to him; not even back when he’d only been a nominal hanger-on with the team. 

It still warmed him, remembering. Him, sitting up in the driver’s seat of the campervan, all trussed up against the sun and waiting to act the bleeding chauffeur, and all the sodding Scoobies carrying on like he was Satan himself at the wheel. Questioning their leader as if they had any damn right to put a word in against any bloody thing she ever decided was the right way to set about a job. And her, facing them all down, flat and impatient and brooking no argument; not even from her Watcher. _“This isn't a discussion! He stays. Get over it.”_

Because she’d trusted him, with Dawn.

Thank Christ he’d never broken that trust, at least. Failed, yeah, but never broken that particular trust.

Himself taken care of for the nonce he pushed up from the bed, he headed for the ewer, because castle life lent itself well to items he’d thought he’d not use again after the regular advent of indoor plumbing. Cleaned up a bit, put himself back in order. Surveyed the neat, almost military room. Bit of alright, he supposed, for a chilly dungeon in an ancient heap of rock. Four-poster. Nice enough. The mattress had done them well enough for sleeping. /See how it holds up when it comes to the shagging before I make my final judgment, though./ Granted, he’d spent the better part of two and a half years kipping on top of a bleedin’ sarcophagus when he’d been too lazy to head downstairs to his bed, like a dramatic tosser, so he supposed after that anything made of cloth and springs would feel right nice. 

He made his way across the room, of a mind to poke into the freestanding mahogany wardrobe. Thing had seen better days, but still was a fine piece, with a bit of work. He wondered where a lot of underground slayerettes had come up with the dosh to outfit a place like this, anyway, but probably a question for another time. Not for him to pass judgment on anyone who’d found a way to make good on bloody decent squatting rights. 

/Probably Rupert made some sort of deal to get the chits on the docket as a restoration group or somesuch./ All they really had to do was keep the place off the touring maps, save at a distance, and they were set. 

He opened the door to the wardrobe, and was promptly assaulted with the overwhelming scent of things Buffy. Had to restrain the urge to climb right up inside among her things and bury himself there for a bit, and no matter that the bed he’d just left had smelled of her, that she was all over him as well, that she had just left him only minutes past. This? Pure, unadulterated Buffy, without the admixture of self to interfere, and, just, bloody hell. Her mates might have given him a spot of hassle over nicking a shirt or two, a pair of knickers or three in his more obsessive years, but Christ, they had no idea what it was like to be a vampire in love. To bathe oneself in the odors of the center of the universe; almost like to being there, enveloped in her body, buried in her soul. 

So much for tossing off. Best stay out of the closet, or he was bound to end up with a permanent stiffy. He closed the door with firm discipline and stepped away. 

Time to be off, any road. She would have warned the lot that he was about by now. Hopefully any of the bitty Slayers as weren’t invited to the meeting would have gotten the memo by this juncture, this being the wonderful world of technology and all. 

He snatched up his duster from the back of the single chair, and one of the blankets from the bed as he headed for the door. And stopped there, frowning at the room. An inside room, even, without a window… as if she had been thinking of him without thinking of him when she’d chosen it. No doubt merely a coincidence; luck of the draw and all that, but as the twilight of it took his eyes, he wondered. Not only was Buffy the general and no doubt could have had her pick of the place, she was a creature of day and sunlight. Should have chosen that, without him about to drag her down, by necessity, into the dark. And yet, even without him, here she was, living quietly in the shadows.

It gave him pause, left him shaking his head pensively as he turned to head out of the spartan accommodation. /Time to find the Bit, if I can manage it without going up in flames./ 

It took some doing, and he had to do a bit of dodging to avoid the instinctive prickles round just about every third corner that screamed, ‘Predator! Danger! Slayer!’ Not that he thought he couldn’t take the chits, but no sense throwing effort after foolishness. It would upset the delicate balance of things this early on; and any road, he didn’t feel like a fight with a bunch of half-trained infants. 

Christ, had they always felt so _young?_ It was almost tough to take the input seriously, instinct or no, compared to the delicious, full-bodied shudder he got whenever he came near Buffy. Hell, even put up next to Faith; and for all she was a hellcat of a bare-knuckles fighter, that bird was scarce half the disciplined warrior his Buffy was.

Eventually he found his way back out to where a sort of a guard-post emptied into the courtyard. A few scattered pockets of Slayers stood about in groups, chatting with one another or sparring. A nice gauntlet. Time, he supposed, to see if news had gotten out that he was friend and not foe, since only a small corner of the place was shaded. If he got into a fight here, the sun would do for him before they could, most like. All it would take would be one wrong step.

/It’s alright, though. Buffy knew where I was going. She’ll have spread the word first thing./

He stepped boldly out into the open space, though he stuck to the shade of the building. Clutched his bit of blanket at the ready, prepared to toss it over his head when time came for his dash through the last twenty-five or so feet between when the shade gave out and the stable opened up. 

As he sauntered into the open, every damn feminine head turned in his direction, eyes coming into sharp, deadly focus. 

/Well, at least they’ve been trained so far as all that./ Not that he’d think Buffy would let the sensing part of things slide. Nor yet Xander, considering that git’s issues with vamps. Good thing too, since he happened to recall a certain young Slayer noticing exactly jack shit about his own first visit to the Bronze, way back when. He’d circled ‘round her as if the waters were chummed, all his deadly intent focused solely on her; and still she’d felt nothing. Just danced the night away, free as a bird and powerful in it. And, if she’d known it at all, calling to him to join in. Make it deadly, make her his.   
  
A kill then, to put her out of mind. Though, later…   
  
Well.

She’d not felt him; or at least, not well enough to put the sensing of him to name, nor yet recognized what it was she sensed. No real perception of his presence, much less his menace and intent; even though he knew Rupert had no doubt spent all his time trying to beat it into her head, earnest as hell. Spike had thought her easy pickings, then. Just another inconsequential child-warrior, till he’d seen the tapes. /Buggered you all to hell instead, didn’t she? Taught you ever to underestimate her again./ 

He was smiling as he came back from the past. Waited patiently to see what the children would do with the information their wee young instincts were shouting at them. 

What they ended in doing, it seemed, was precisely nothing. They just watched, as if he were a curiosity. A deadly one, but an untouchable one nonetheless. Their attitudes reminded him of nothing so much as the way a child might stand very still while a honeybee darted about nearby, as if hoping that by remaining uninterested in the beast’s business, it would in turn keep its sting firmly to itself.

/Well. No love lost to start, is it?/ Not that he could blame them. Least they were good at following orders, though. It boded well for future business when it game to engagements with bastards like the sodding Scourge.

Crisis past for the nonce, Spike turned and headed toward the stable, moving swiftly along the line of shade. Came to the point of no return, aware that he was still being observed with tense fascination, not a sound to indicate a resumption of conversation or activity behind him. /Well, watch this, luvs. The sideshow freak is about to perform./ 

With a fierce grin, he shook out the blanket and pulled it up around himself, over his head till only his eyes showed. Even his knuckles were covered, save at the ends of his unpainted fingernails. And made a dash for it.

The blaring sense of mortal danger overtook him, as always, when he did this, roaring through his being. It was a thrill for an ageless being to feel mortality, which was the reason he’d once sought this sort of thing out. The sun. Smoking. The lot. The _exhilaration_ of it all; everything in his being shrieking at him to dive under the nearest anything; to seek cover, to escape, to find a pond, a barrel, fucking _hide!_ Adrenaline shot through him, stronger than he ever got from anything but a fight to the death, or from rutting with Buffy with the demon-side of him in full charge when he’d just had her blood. His lips peeled back from his teeth… and once upon a time it would have been difficult to keep his human guise in front while he did this, as the thrill overtook him.

But he was never further from game face now as he blazed his trail. He’d already burned, was the thing. Made it all quite sodding different. Made the thrill a bit less exciting, a bit more real.

He finished his mad dash smoking slightly under his jeans, around his knuckles, a bit at his eyebrows, inside his boots. The stinging was still a reminder, at least, that he existed; still had his parody of life, and he cursed a bit, sizzling, the light, all-over pain of it giving him wings as he dove for the overhang of the stable and rolled to safety. 

And only then did he inhale; in relief. And in recognition, because, well. His bloody demon was most definitely fully fucking awake, now, and shifting around in a state of deep discontent with its current chauffeur. It brought Spike's new, bipartite existence into sharp relief, in a way that he had never experienced pre-soul. He had certainly never been so thoroughly aware of that side of himself as something with... recognizable edges. It was all just... him, before.   
  
No more had he had ever been aware of the soul as a separate part of himself, till the amulet had made him certain of its existence as anything more than a new acquaintance with depthless guilt and the recognition of his myriad regrets. He had felt the edges of that part of himself only on that fateful day; sharply, cuttingly, though he had gone for the diminutively ironic, of course, with, _'Sort of stings'._

Similarly, for the first time, beginning on that night in LA during that battle, when Buffy had set it free again, Spike could feel the part of himself he had been since his siring as a separate entity from the soul. And, it was bloody strange.

It was as if all the parts of himself were all-too-aware of one another now, and jostling for ascendancy.   
  
At the moment, it seemed his demonside was on top, and snarling with it. Good thing he wasn't in the mood to pop into game face, with all the chits looking on. Apparently it took being not merely back in his home dimension, but also threatened with a good, square dusting to keep him roused to the surface; much as did battle and sex. Though… now that Spike thought about it in any detail... /Sod was awake most of the night, come to that, yeah? Rumbling away at Buffy like a bloody housecat and murmuring contented sodding things about ‘mate’ and ‘home’ and the like./ It certainly hadn't been like that in Hell-A. Couldn't rouse the bastard for anything there, save for the necessary.

Still lying full-length in the dust, Spike prodded at himself, wondering at the difference. First time he'd felt anything from his demonside of late beyond lust, a bit of primitive hunger... and a sort of purring calm. /Tosser's just too bloody happy anymore is the thing. Needs a good stiff fight/ Spike decided. /Something bracing to wake the wanker up./ Not that he preferred being dissatisfied, as a general rule. It was just, what if he ended up soul-side up as often this side as he was in Hell-A, just because the prat was too bleedin' contented to do more than look at Buffy and make kitten noises at her like a great sodding tamed lion? /C’mon, you pansy. ‘M gonna have to jog out in the bloody sunshine all the sodding time to keep all the bits of m’self awake, is it?/

Spike shook the blanket off of his hair and pulled a face as he rolled to a crouch. Once upon a time, he would’ve welcomed the contest. Had done, actually. Now, he viewed the morning light with a certain jaundiced air. It was no longer a challenge to be won within himself. He’d done it and more with that bloody amulet. In that year with Angel he’d played a lot less with Mr. Fucking Sunshine; because it was both easier… and harder, to face fire now. He no longer feared burning the same way. The pain of it was nothing compared to what it had been when he had died. But… He had the hell of a lot more to live for than he ever had before. And he had never been the sort to throw away his unlife. /Well, not unless there was cause. Not unless there were green eyes, and a Reason./

He kind of fucking missed the freedom of the Hell-A sun… but it must be said that while he was there he had also, maybe perversely, missed this. Missed the rush of it. Missed the challenge. Facing down his own fear, and beating it. Winning. 

His demon, though, it seemed, had mixed feelings about the affair. It was wide awake… and not particularly pleased about being roused so firmly from its rest by something less pleasant than nibbling on Buffy. Somnolent bastard. /Wakie wakie, you lazy git. You’re home./

Coming to his feet, he swung the blanket idly, like a pendulum, to put out the last of the embers, and glanced around the stable for Bit. It would be a rum go if, after all that, she was out somewhere and he had to head back through that mess with nothing to show for it… 

“What are you _doing?_ Haven’t you burned up _enough_ , you idiot?” 

The screech was music to his ears, covering up as it did the stunned silence from the gaping children outside. /Thank Christ./ “Hey, Niblet.”

“I can see why Buffy calls you that so much!” Approaching him from behind, Dawn entered the stable, casting a long shadow over his back where he crouched, still dangerously close to the verge of sunshine at the jamb. “Just, ugh!”

He straightened, swinging his still-smoldering blanket over one shoulder and resettled the duster round his collar. /Alright, but I’m her idiot. Bit much to get it from you, too, Dawn./ Patted a little dirt off of his black jeans. “Wanted to see you, innit? Know you can’t get inside, so…”

He was met with an uncompromising glare. “How do you think I’d feel if you turned into Mr. Dusty in front of me because you wanted to come _see_ me?” To his stunned amazement, she was in tears, and oh, bloody hell. He couldn’t handle a Summers girl crying. 

/Please, no./ “C’mon, Platelet. I’m fine. I’m sorry if I scared you, yeah? Not like it’s new for me to run about outside in the daylight…”

“You’re stupid. And I just got you back. And I can’t even _hit_ you right now, because I’m too big, and you… You’re… You’re…” She was sobbing now, and oh bloody Christ. She had collapsed onto her rear on the ground, face in her hands, and he couldn’t remember seeing the Niblet cry more than once even after her sister had died. Jags of rage and screaming and that, but she tended more toward hysteria than tears, and… balls. He’d had no idea the little bird cared so buggering much about his worthless arse. 

“I’m sorry, Dawn,” he whispered, and risked an approach to lay an only lightly-scorched hand on her massive shoulder. “Alright, Bit? I’m really sorry. I was just bumping around the bloody place on my own, and I missed you. Wanted to spend some time, and I thought…”

She was talking into her hands. Despite his hearing, he could barely make her out, through the sobs and the muffling action of it all. 

Not, at least, till he drew a bit closer. “I said I’d set you on fire, Spike.”

Oh, fucking Christ, he couldn’t take this. “Bit, don’t.” 

But she couldn’t seem to stop. “When I… When I saw you didn’t… make it to the bus…” She was choking, her shoulders wracked, and buggering fuck, she was like her sister. She fell apart if she couldn’t hit something. “That’s when I… realized how much I loved you. That it didn’t matter. If Buffy forgave you, so could I, and…” Her sobs were ruining him, because she was too large for him to pull her close, comfort her, so what the bloody fuck was he supposed to do right now? Best he could manage was to keep his hands on her arm, and that was shite, really. “I just missed you, so much. I couldn’t believe… you weren’t there, every day. That you would… never be there again.” 

/Sodding balls, Spike, you really bollixed things up proper, staying away./ 

The sobs were fading to juddering breaths now, thank god… but now she was just staring at the floor, voice small. “I used to be so mad. I felt so betrayed, because I’ve always felt… so _safe_ with you; and of all people I never thought you’d hurt my sister, so I just didn’t know what to think.”

/Oh, Christ, Niblet, I’m so sorry. I never meant to betray you. You of all people…/ Of course it wouldn’t help to tell her that he’d never thought he’d hurt Buffy, either. Not really.

“And then you left, and it was easier, because I didn’t have to. Didn’t have to think about it at all. And then you were back, and you had a soul, and you were so different… and at the same time you were still _you_ , and even when I avoided you I couldn’t…”

“Dawn…” She was breaking him.

“…I still wanted to trust you. Still wanted to just climb in your lap and have you pet my head and smell that smell that always made me feel so good and so safe; your leather jacket and the cigarettes and Spike-smell, and have you tell me you’d be there for us and everything was gonna be okay, and I knew I could never have that again. And then, right when I thought maybe I could have it back, you…” And he jumped when, out of nowhere, she flicked him in the chest, hard, with one overlarge finger. “You _died_ , and I couldn’t ever tell you that I…” Her breath hitched again. “That I was sorry, and I would really _never_ …”

He rubbed his chest with one hand—because, bloody ow, dammit!—and prayed she wasn’t about to cry again. He might just stake himself if she did. She might already be, for all that. She wasn’t talking anymore, and her shoulders were shaking. 

/Sodding fuck./ It was all he could do. Tugged her down, and she came, ponderously, like a tree falling. Landed on one large hand, propping herself… and buried her face in his chest. It was as large as most of him from side to side and about throat to solar plexus, but that scarcely mattered right now, as long as he could get his arms around some part of her and hold on tight. “I’m so sorry, Niblet,” he told her, low and earnest. “I didn’t mean to go. It just seemed like the right thing to do at the mo’. Never thought it would bother anyone but big sis, and even her not that much.” He sighed at her brassed-off noise and tried a tentative pat to the large shoulder, arms wrapped tight round her neck while he prayed she wasn’t entirely sobbing anymore. And not only because she would no doubt soak through his damn shirt if she did. “Guess I made a right hash of the whole bloody thing.”

She hiccuped a bit against him, but didn’t speak. Maybe she couldn’t as yet. 

“Still. Don’t you ever be sorry, alright? You had every right to be brassed off at me; and to light me on fire if you ever had the chance, yeah? I love that about you. Your fire. You’re a right chip off the Summers block, and don’t you ever lose that.”

A tremor ran through her. “I don’t want you to leave again.” Her voice, young and tragic and muffled by pressure and sorrow, rocked him. He nodded and tightened his arms, wondering just what the hell he had done to weld to him the affections of two such women as these. Him, of all people. He was used to being depended on, a bit, by one madwoman… but this?

Still. /Stayin’ on is what you’re good at, Spike./ “Already promised. You’ve got me, Bit. I’m not going anywhere ever again.”

“You better not. You stupid jerk.”

He sighed into the gloom of the stable. Another consensus opinion from House Summers, that. 

Amazing they all wanted him around, but he supposed there was no accounting for taste. Lucky for him.

***

**B:  
**  
Buffy really had no clue what to make of her damn vampire right now, but she for sure didn’t have time to analyze the problem. She had to get downstairs and deal with logistics first. Apparently without him, for whatever stupid reason, and could he have come up with more idiotic motives to avoid this meeting? /Seriously, what is going _on_ with you, Spike?/ 

He was acting super flighty since this morning. Almost skittish. Hard to pin down, even vaguely noncommittal… which was weird and not like him, and just, gah. /What even. I know you hate sitting still for this stuff, but you did it enough back in Hell-A. If _I_ can do it, you can do it!/ 

She wasn’t sure if that was the problem, though, with all his, ‘You have to dominate them first without me around’ garbage. Like, yeah. Sure, there were going to be some outraged voices at the council, and she was going to have to shout more than a few of them down once they found out the nature of her relationship with him, but dammit, he was a _part_ of that! Why did he want her to handle it all on her own?

Not that it mattered right now. He wasn’t going to be there, so fine. She’d face it like she faced everything, whether Spike was there in the room to quietly back her or not. Whether she wanted to do this without him or not. / _Damn_ you./

He hadn’t even changed his mind when she got him all hot and bothered. Usually that had him following her around like he was on an invisible leash; had since before they’d started this whole thing years ago. But apparently not right now? 

/Not the time to figure him out. Think about the Scourge. Walls, weapons, defenses, troop deployments. Strategies… Not about your vampire lover and his bizarre, random need to completely wig out suddenly now that we’re back here in the thick of a whole other kind of battle… 

/And you’re just pissed off, Buffy, because _this_ is the battle that scares you most. A lot more than the one with the stupid Scourge, or any of the rest of it. The odd apocalypse, you can handle, but Spike getting the wig and punking out on you, not so much./ 

Biting her lip, she pulled in a deep breath and schooled her expression to hardness before she pushed through the door to the main council chamber. Right now she needed to focus on business, and only business. Later she could go have a fight with her idiot guy and figure out what the hell his stupid problem was.

Satsu looked up right away as she entered, shot to her feet as she always did. “General.”

Buffy waved a tired hand. “Satsu, I thought I told you not to call me that. For one thing, it’s completely not accurate.”

Lounging in a chair beside his second-in-command, Xander snorted dryly. “It really kinda is, Buffy, but I getcha. Problem is, I don’t think you’re gonna get the younger generation to shake it.”

She rolled her eyes as she moved to take her place at the head of the table between her oldest friend and the younger Slayer; Satsu on her right, Xander at her left. Wondered idly as she did if Xander would notice the new scar there, on her neck, and if he did, if he would lose it and bring it up in front of everyone? And, okay; was it bad that she kind of wanted him to? It would bring everything to a head quick, get it over with. But at the same time, the fight just sounded… exhausting. 

All of it sounded exhausting. Facing her life now felt like work. But it needed to be done. /This is just, like, some kind of reentry thing, and you have jet-lag of the soul or something. Or your inner demony-side is tired from doing the Conduit thing, and doesn’t wanna play catch-up back home. Or your human-y parts are whiny about having to go back to work after a long vaycay. Which is fair, since, you know, no vacation since you were fifteen, unless you count a few weeks with Dad and a few in an asylum, and whenever you got sick or injured enough to have to not fight for a few days./ 

Buffy had never more felt of two minds about being outed. 

She had actually shocked herself when she had felt a brief moment’s… well, wistfulness during Spike’s little spiel about ‘some other bird’ taking over if she got ousted. /That’s not okay, Buffy. This is your _duty_. You can’t just… hope they kick you out so you can go on your merry way with your vamp-lover. This isn’t Hell-A. That was… an anomaly. A nice break, but it wasn’t real./ 

Anyway, it wasn’t likely to happen right away. Not before she got everyone in hand here. The light was kind of low in here; mostly a reflection of computer-monitor-glow, all behind her, and a few desk lamps, which were totally pointed at the stuff on the table. /And it’s not like Xander spends a lot of time inspecting my throat. Though, now he knows I’m with a vamp again…/ On the other hand, Spike’s mark tended to be almost invisible except in direct light; at least compared to her old ones. 

Subtle was so not a word she would apply to her guy in most circumstances, but when it came to how he marked a girl, it fit.

Turning her gaze to survey the gathering, Buffy forced her mind to the necessities of the moment. She had a job to do. “Are we all here?”

The meeting swiftly came to order, Slayers and seconds and trainers from three different cells stilling to watch her with attentive eyes. Brittany, led by a woman named Tifenn and seconded by one with the slightly more exotic-sounding name of Privela. Nadira and Daphne from the London cell, and of course Rowena and Leah from her own. Renee and Gia were down on the training floor keeping an eye on the trainees. “Thanks, everyone, for forting up together here. I know it wasn’t easy on short notice, and I don’t like to ask you all to suspend your normal routines.” The cells were kind of autonomous, but with a menace like this… “We all have our own ways of doing things, but the threat that’s coming is worth the consideration.”

“Yeah, exactly why are these geezers coming for us?” Nadira put in, sounding flummoxed. 

Here was where the balancing act came in. The leaders might be able to handle knowing some of the unwanted information regarding the Slayer Line. How much they told their trainees was entirely another matter, but the subject in full really wasn’t for all ears. Hence the leaders-only meeting. 

First things first, though. “Before we get into that, I need to ask you all a favor. I have an ally here. Someone I’ve worked with for years, known almost as long as I’ve known Xander…”

Xander snorted a little, but without the derisive quality he might have put on it a few years ago. And, also unlike he would’ve a few years ago, he didn’t chime in to qualify that with a, ‘Yeah, and the first few years were skeezy, obsessive-enemy-type years’, or anything like that. Probably because he didn’t want to die for prejudicing her spiel.

Still, she kept one eye on him for a moment before she turned her gaze back on the rest. “I need to ask that you inform all your girls to let him go about his business unmolested while you’re here. In fact, I have to insist.”

There was a short silence from the crowd, then, “Why would anyone bother this ally of yours?” Daphne asked, sounding stumped.

Moment of truth. “Because he’s a vampire.”

The room exploded into shocked protests. She let the tumult reign for a short minute before she held up a hand. “Quiet. Hear me out.”

They did, because they knew her reputation. Knew her experience. Some of the girls outside couldn’t fathom some of the things she’d seen, done, been through. Hell, some of these women in here would never understand, but at least these ones were mature enough to appreciate leadership and the inborn authority that came from deadly experience. 

They, at least, were slightly willing to acknowledge that she might know a thing or two they hadn’t yet learned. “Not all vampires require an automatic stake to the chest, and not every demon is evil.” It was a pronouncement that would have been decried as heresy according to the teachings she had gotten in her day… but she had been extremely careful in her own over this last year, and insisted on same with Xander, Rona, Vi, and Andrew, at least. No clue what Giles and Robin were doing, but she couldn’t control everyone. /The fewer minds poisoned the better/ she had thought, then, and carried on with her quiet, subtle revolt; in honor of a few old friends like Clem… and a man who had sacrificed his unlife for them all. Most of them had no idea what _he_ had done for them, but she would force them to honor him anyway.

Now, though… They would _know_ him. Firsthand look at why they needed to understand. “And yeah; I know that’s not something we can tell the new kids on the block. We can’t afford to have them hesitating for even an instant. They need to memorize the baddies and friendlies list and make no exceptions… but the fact of the matter is, I’ve learned different, more than once or twice… and Spike I trust with my life. He’s literally died for me and my people back on the Sunnydale hellmouth, so here’s the deal. No one here is even to give him a hard time, or I’m gonna hear about it.”

There was a short silence, and then Satsu broke in, voice low. “Is he the guy we heard about who’s running things in LA? The one with a soul?”

Xander scoffed again, though this time it sounded more like a choking noise. Buffy ignored him. “No. Though he does have a soul. But that doesn’t matter. He was helping out and doing the right thing long before he got it.” She hardened her gaze, ran it around her captive audience. “I’m gonna be real here. Spike’s had my back when no one else has. Anyone dusts him, I _will_ kill that girl. I won’t even think twice about it.” She couldn’t really think about that actually happening. The point was to make sure that it didn’t. /No time-loops here./

“She won’t, either,” Xander broke in then, voice bland and a little grim. “She almost killed one of our allies back in Sunnydale for conspiring against him, and she’s barely talked to her own Watcher since then because he was a part of it.” His eye flickered to hers, and he sighed a little. “Which, to be fair, was kind of a douche move. Spike’s alright.”

/Xan-man. Full of surprises lately./

“What, er, does this specialty vampire even look like?” Nadira asked, clearly very taken aback by her vehemence and Xander’s quiet recounting. “So we don’t make a mistake and do him in?”

/Okay? As if there are going to be dozens of invited vamps running around the place?/ “I don’t suppose any of you remembers who Billy Idol is?” she tried, though no doubt it was going to be a bust.

Daphne’s eyebrows rose, but the rest of the table was a resounding sea of blank looks. 

Xander rolled his single eye and took this one too, before she had to bother expanding on it. “Picture a lot of leather, Doc Martins, and basically what would happen if you turned a guy upside down in a vat of peroxide…”

“Xander…”

“Big showy scar on one eyebrow. Sneers a lot, but it’s all attitude. Whenever he gets around Buffy here, or Dawnie, he turns into a giant puppy. It’s kind of pathetic, actually.”

/For God’s sake. Way to advertise. Thanks, Xan./ “He’s really a very good person. He’ll be at the next meeting so you can all get to know him.” /If I have to drag him here by his stupid lapels./

Satsu, she noticed, was staring at her with an odd, sick expression on her face. She wasn’t sure what that was about, but she didn’t have the time to figure it out. “Rowena, will you circulate the description real quick?” Nothing. “Rowena!”

The stunned stare broke abruptly, and Rowena turned her attention to her phone with a nod. “Aye. Sure thing, boss.” Her tongue between her teeth, she started tapping at her screen, diligent and frowning as if it were saying something offensive. “‘Orders: Don’t. Kill. Blond. Vampire. He’s. Friendly.’ That good?”

Buffy sighed internally and prayed the girls would take the message seriously. She might leave the stupid meeting to find her guy in the middle of a brawl, fighting for his life. /You could be here with me instead, but no./ “Alright. The Scourge.”

“Yes, them.” Tifenn leaned forward, her thick French accent causing the rest to fall silent and pay attention. “Why do these ones come for us? They are some demon army, yes? It is because we are forming our own army of demon-fighters?”

“Well…” Here was where it got touchy. “It’s a little more complicated than that, though that’s part of it. See… The Scourge’s whole gig is demon purity. They have a whole ‘service to the Old Ones’ thing happening.” Which, alright; after meeting Illyria in her true form, she could see why those Old Ones could make a lasting impression. She didn’t want to make the world worthy for them to come back and rule or anything, but from a demon perspective… she kind of got it. /I’ll of course fight that fate with everything I’ve got till the end of time, but I get the mentality./ “Demon Old Ones are basically like God. They ruled here before we ever came on the scene, and they were pure demon in a way you can never fathom.”

“And _hyuuuge_ ,” Xander put in, fingers spread on the desk. Clearly he was thinking of the Mayor.

/You should’ve seen tentacle-girl. She’d eat the Mayor for a snack./ “They tend to be large, yeah. And they made a pretty big impression on the lesser demons. Since they got sidelined, the demon world had been kind of left to their own devices here, and a lot of them have survived in hiding by…” How to say it? “Intermixing with humanity.”

At least half of the women in the room winced. Xander, she noticed, flicked his eyes at her, but then his gaze turned inward, which, um, yeah? “The Scourge kind of hate that, because of the purity thing. They make it their gig to go around deleting any species they consider to be less-than-perfect demon-y types, unworthy to inherit the earth and serve the Old Ones when they return…”

“Wait; are these Old Ones coming back?” Rowena demanded, sounding pretty thoroughly spooked.

Buffy had kind of forgotten what it was like to not know how to face ye standard apocalypse. It seemed the prospect rattled the newbies. “Not at the moment, but for them I guess it’s kind of like, you know, it could happen anytime if you get the world in the right shape. You know, like the people who think Jesus is always coming soon if everyone would just hurry up and stop sinning?” 

To her surprise it was Satsu who snorted this time, to cover a laugh that was damn near a giggle. Her eyes danced, though. 

The tension in the room lightened with everyone but, she thought, Privela, who she belatedly recalled was kind of a big-time Catholic. Well, darn. “Anyway, vamps are the biggest offenders to them, because that’s how they reproduce, but the ones who do it the old-fashioned way are their next least-favorite…”

“What’s that got to do with us, though?” Nadira demanded impatiently. “They want to off their own kind I say let them, and no skin off ours!”

Buffy sighed inwardly and held up one hand to interrupt a tirade she knew by heart. “It’s more complicated than that, since for one, a lot of the creatures they’re knocking off have souls and aren’t hurting anyone. But that’s beside the point right now. We didn’t pick this fight with them. They’re coming after us.”

That caused another stir. “Okay, but _why?”_ Satsu demanded, sounding stumped. “Do they think we’re going to get in their way, or…”

“They kill part-demon mixtures. And we’re in sufficient number now to threaten them. We weren’t before, when there was only one active Slayer at a time, but now… We could possibly stop them. We could end them. They don’t want to admit that half-breeds might actually be stronger than they are.”

She let it sit there, and waited.

Predictably, there was a short silence so profound you could hear a penny drop… and then the table exploded. 

She let the storm rage for a while, did not even bother to try to rein in the shouting protests, the outright vituperation. They needed to get it all out of their systems for a second, get over the initial shock of her assertion, before she could override it enough to get them to hear her. After all, she knew. 

She knew how much of an upset to one’s personal identity it was, to think oneself utterly human, and then to realize, slowly but surely, that you never were. Not really. Not wholly. That you were at least part of a demon. And that part of you was set to fight, to kill, others very much like yourself… and what did that make you?

Her eyes found Xander’s one remaining one, and she waited. /Well?/

He looked back, regarding her quiet and thoughtful beneath the din, and then nodded once, slowly, in recognition. /Yeah/ his expression said. /Huh. Okay, makes sense./ And then, the flicker. The realization. /So _that’s_ why. That’s why you always…/

/Always gravitate to demon guys? Yeah. That about sums it up./

His eye flickered away again, a rueful acknowledgment hanging around his lined, damaged features. He would understand that too. After all, he had loved a demon, and knew that as a fully human guy, it hadn’t been easy for him. But for her… it was clearly what she craved. 

Her problems had come in when she had tried too hard to pretend. That she wasn’t what she was. That she was fully human, and her demons were _not_ what she needed.

The ruckus had gone on long enough. “Alright, alright. Let me explain.”

The table full of stunned, horrified women slowly settled, turning to her with livid eyes demanding that she deny her words, explain them away, tell them she could qualify her statement in some way that validated their collective existence as more or less than that which she had just put on them. They wanted to be that which had always believed they were. 

Unfortunately, she could not return their peace of mind to them. Not with proof marching up the road, possibly armed with impure-demon-seeking weaponry. “The thing is, whether you want to believe it or not, our abilities, our strengths, our senses? They aren’t human. There’s a reason we have this instinct, this drive, and that we aren’t able to put it away, get rid of it, tone it down. It’s because it’s in our essence, in the backs of our minds; it’s a part of us. And the Scourge will use that against us unless we acknowledge it and use it to combat them. So you can protest all you want, but pretty quick here we’re gonna have to get real about it if we’re gonna survive.”

“I’m no ruddy demon!” Nadira half-shrieked, face going scarlet as she slammed her fists down on the table. “I’ve fought those slime-suckers, and I…”

Xander came to his feet, silencing all opposition. “Once upon a time,” he broke in quietly, “there were these demons. Really scary ones; like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Real walking corpses, with no human memories, no other lives. A plague. They were kind of… weaponized against humans, because humans were taking over the demon world, and the Old Ones, the demon rulers, were pissed at being squeezed out. And the humans were being decimated by these weaponized demons, who used humans to feed, and to breed. They were…” He frowned over at Buffy, looking pensive. “Like Terminators. Different strains; and some of them, as they bred more and more with us, were getting good at hiding in the populace. They were starting to work out real well as a war-tactic, even if their bosses were long gone. They might even have made Earth a place for their gods to come back to…” He straightened up as something occurred to him that had clearly never occurred to him before now. “Even if it meant they’d go extinct someday without snacks and human breeders.”

/Yes, Xander. They were made to be weapons, just like the Slayers. And yes; they need humans to survive. That’s how I understood Spike from the start; because there is common ground to be found, if we can get that through their thick heads./ She frowned inwardly, wondering if maybe the incognito strain of vamps they all knew so well today might even have been made later, as a response to the weaponization of the Slayer, who had been made in turn to fight the Turok-Han. An arms-race in a war of mutual annihilation. 

Xander looked troubled as he went on; a slow, thoughtful murmur. “So then there was this girl. A captive, we think; or at least that group of old, scared men would probably not have done this to one of their own. We can’t be sure, of course, because desperate times. But they did, either way. They took this girl, because she had the ability. Maybe she had the Sight, could connect to the Powers. Maybe she was just a good fighter; who knows. All we know is, they were under siege, and none of them wanted to make the sacrifice themselves. So they grabbed her in her sleep, without her consent. Tied her up in a cave, where she couldn’t move. Exposed her to a demon’s essence. Turned her into a weapon of their own.” 

His voice tightened, making it clear that he was empathizing with what it must have been like to be held down and to have his body painfully invaded while helpless. To losing something profound by that violation. /His eye. He’s relating it to losing his eye./ Everything clenched down in her, even though she was glad, in this moment, that he could relate it to something. Put feeling into it. 

“The demon forced its way into her. She couldn’t escape. It grafted, becoming a part of her, its essence flowing into every cell of her being, settling into her mind. Lending her instinct, drive, strength and power. And when these cowardly old men, these leaders, released the girl, she was their tool. And they Watched, and they prodded, and set her loose on those who had once preyed on them, secure in the knowledge that she would do their bidding… because she could do nothing else. She had no other function anymore, had become divorced from her everyday life. She lived at night, like those she hunted. She guarded the people she had once been a part of; kept them safe in their sleep, because now she could sense their enemy. She patrolled their graves, destroyed the restless things that rose up out of the earth, and never slept herself. And the only way she could ever rest was when she found death.”

It shuddered through Buffy’s being, remembering that final, agonizing death-wish. The exhausted desire to be free, finally. 

“But even then…” Xander’s voice took on a pained, tragic note that was all very personal. “Something happened. The essence of demon passed on, into another girl who had the strength in her blood to contain it. Another rose in her stead. The old men had wrought too well, or just well enough. The demon didn’t want to die with her, you see. So it went on, and on, down through the ages; and so did the old men who Watched. And they came to think they owned these girls, because they’d made them. But finally, one day,” and now his voice throbbed with passionate allegiance, “the girls fought back, and let the old men know they were powerful. That they were _free_. And they rose up. All of them who had the strength to carry that power. They banded together, commanded their own fate.” His eye found Buffy’s, everything in him still committed, despite all he had been through at her side. “And the men who followed knew that their job was to stand back. Support. Aid. But that’s all. Because it was the women who had the power in this gig. And about time, because damn right.”

He sat back down and folded his hands in his lap, apparently all talked out for the day. 

Admiration filled Buffy. Because he was doing it right. Full disclosure. Sharing the wealth of his knowledge, and when had he become so eloquent? He sounded almost like Andrew there, only without the pompous, and, just… /Wow, Xan. You really are a great Watcher./ 

The room came slowly back to life, as if shifting out of a trance. “How… How come no one ever told us this?” Rowena demanded, sounding shaky as hell.

Buffy turned her gaze back to the crowd. “You didn’t need to know,” she answered quietly. “It’s a heavy burden, knowing you’re part vampire…”

The room exploded again, shock pervading, and alright, she hadn’t been sure she was going to share that part until she had. She maybe should have kept that little titbit quiet… but again. What the leaders told their trainees was their own business. And maybe this was horrible timing, and she was completely demoralizing her army right before a fight… but dammit, they deserved to know. 

Xander’s eye on hers went stunned, too, now… but then it caught on something thoughtful and held. And recognition flooded it, dark and unquiet. 

“Think about it,” Buffy went on, her still voice carrying through the tumult. “They were the ones who preyed most on humans, all throughout history. If you’re gonna make a weapon to fight a weapon… They’re the ones who come from us, and are most like us… and they’re the only ones we actually feel. Like recognizes like, right?” 

In that moment she badly missed the feel of her own personal vampire at her back; could swear she could feel him standing there, hands touching her shoulders, slipping under her hair, sharing his pride in her for facing them all down.

/ _Damn_ you, Spike./

“Oh, man…” Xander whispered beside her, and he rubbed a hand up through his cowlick, clearly dealing with a whole host of feelings about her, and her thing for vamps, and Angel, and the missing dope Spike, and…

/Yeah, Xan. There’s totally a reason./ “Which _means_ ,” she went on, leaning hard on the words, “The Scourge hate us double-hard. We’re made up of the demon they most despise, and are a mostly-human half-breed to boot. One that now, with our numbers, stands to destroy their whole party. So yeah. They’re coming for us.” She hardened her voice. “Which means whether you’re having an existential crisis right now over our mixy nature or you can deal, you’re gonna need to put it aside right now and focus on that later, because in this moment we have a job to do, and it’s called surviving through the next few days. Maybe later we can hash out what this all means for slaying, and Slayer-demon relations, but first we have to get through tomorrow.” She leaned forward, hands on the table, and laid it out uncompromisingly. She knew Slayers; knew how to work them. They _were_ her. “I need to know right now, ladies; do you think you can do that, or do you want to just lay down and die for these guys? Because they don’t really care if you repent. If you wanna be all human or not. All they care about is what they sense; what they smell. And they _will_ kill us all, wherever we go.”

That hardened them up, to a woman. She watched them straighten, purpose-driven once more. Slayers were excellent at ‘act now, angst tomorrow’. “It’s a fight, then,” Daphne muttered, low and fierce. 

“Buggers won’t know what hit ‘em,” Nadira agreed. 

“With you, General,” Tifenn agreed, face firming up.

“Alright, then.” Surveying the table, Buffy nodded, and turned to Xander and Satsu. “Where are we on fortifications?”

Xander cleared his throat, straightening in his chair. “Oh. Um, the south wall has been shored up…”

***  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Right, then...   
Readjustments, and some politics... and some renegotiating relationships... and a lot of general 'feeling their way back into stuff', internally and externally.  
All with baddies en route, because nothing like outside pressure while a lot of inside stuff is uncertain,   
XD  
(quote by Andrew Cohen)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all you amazing peeps! I ran behind in here again, and I apologize. RL has been being a real beyotch! Hope everyone's surviving ok out there. I owe you much comment-reply-ness once more. I am on it soon, I swear.
> 
> Hm... trying to remember what to warn for, if anything, in this chapter.   
> Oh. Right. Tiny bit of anal-ness, though barely enough to write home about, IMO. Me making a little meta-commentary on some things that happened in the comics that I thought were kind of incredibly stupid, because I like to have my say...
> 
> Hm... can't think of anything else, except to say that when I wrote this, I fully intended for these two to have, like, a conversation. In words.
> 
> They took one look at this sort-of-debate I had started, and decided to have their conversation with their bodies instead. I got no real say in the matter. Though, that's fairly common with Spuffy; in both respects. hehe.  
> (They do finish actually talking in here. Eventually.)

She needed to get something in her belly that was more complex than a croissant before she headed out to go hunt for her truant vampire. He didn’t feel like he was currently fighting for his life, anyway, so no need to initiate an emergency search. By the vibe in the blood-bond, he was out there somewhere in the general vicinity of Dawn’s spot and currently experiencing some kind of guilt-trip, which… /Good/ Buffy thought a little savagely as she swept through the room the cell had set up as a makeshift refectory and grabbed a tray full of food. Ran a glance over the room. Saw Xander sitting with his head down over by one wall, fairly close to the door that led to the main exit. He was fondling a can of that weird Scottish soda he was addicted to now, Irn Bru, even though Buffy had told him more than once that she was pretty sure it was radioactive. 

Renee, she noted, was sitting with him; leaning over, touching his unoccupied hand. God, that girl really did think he was her private project. Buffy was slightly concerned about it, actually. For one, it was bad for discipline if there was a crush-type thing going on there, and two… Xander was just so not in that place. Time to add a third wheel to that little party, so Buffy plunked down her tray and flung a leg over the seat without announcement or request for permission. “Hey, Renee. Mind if I get a word in edgewise with Xan, here? Need to pick his brain about something.”

Renee looked startled at her sudden appearance, as if she had been so absorbed in prodding Xander that she hadn’t even noticed her superior’s approach. “Oh. Right. Yeah. Hi, boss.” Pulling back, she started to rise, though Buffy noticed she looked… Well, not exactly resentful, per se, but definitely a little deflated by the interruption.

Okay, yeah. That would bear watching.

“Hey,” she murmured as the girl disappeared. “Thanks for taking on storytelling duty back there.”

Xander smiled about one-quarter of a smile in her general direction, tossed an untouched apple from hand to hand. “Yeah, well, you know. Watcher-guy, right? Comes with the territory.”

“You were really good.” She let the warmth show through. He deserved it. 

“Yeah?” And a little of the old Xander showed through for a moment before he shrugged and leaned back, crossing his legs. “The Xan-man comes through.” He shook his head. “No Andrew when it comes to the storytelling thing, but…”

“No, you were a lot more to the point, and you didn’t fill it with a bunch of flowery garbage like he would. You scared them and you made them think. Thank you.” She hoped he really heard the sincerity in her voice.

He nodded a little, eyes still on his apple. After a moment, he ventured, “So, uh… vampire-demon?” There was a note behind it that asked just exactly how long she’d known that little morsel of information.

“When I ran into the Scourge down in Florence,” she answered the unspoken question softly. “They called me a wolf-dog bred to guard the sheep, who had forgotten I was a wolf. That every time I got close to the real wolves, I remembered what I really was…” She trailed off, wondering if he’d jump on it.

He just twitched a little, though, and remained silent on the subject of her vampire relations. And when he finally spoke, it was to take an entirely different tack; one that was all business. “So, how about these Scourge guys, huh? You think we can take ‘em?”

His overabundant heartiness always hurt, nowadays, it was so forced. Had been since the eye; and even more so since the battle that had cost him his love. But it reminded her that she owed him the subject change; owed him a lot more than rolling with his comfort zones. So she went with it. “I don’t know.” She could be a little more cheerlead-y with the squad back there, but with Xander? Always best to be real with a guy who had been down to the wire with her through every battle. “But we’ve seen worse, right?”

“Guess we’ll find out,” he answered roughly. “Anyway, the girls are shaping up well. Satsu’s a good teacher. She has them whipped into pretty good shape. And they know their stuff. I’ve made sure of it…”

She covered his hand with hers. “I know you have. You’re an amazing Watcher, with all you’ve seen.”

He looked away and down, shrugged a little. “Got to use the skills somewhere.” Straightened a little. “And now we’ve got giant Dawnie, and you’ve got Spike back. The gang’s half here, so it’ll be a party.”

The catch was there in his voice; the one that was about the ones who weren’t here… and okay. Maybe not so much with the avoid-y, after all. What did Spike say? Once more into the breach, or something? “I get that… it’s probably hard for you," she began tentatively. "But I had to bring him. And he deserves to come…”

“Hey. Like I said. The more the merrier, right?” He shrugged again, eyes on the fruit between his hands. “Spike’s alright, you know.” 

/‘Alright’. There it is again./ For Xander that was like saying the sky was green, or he was in love with Angel. She just couldn’t get a handle on it. “I know you think he’s good in a fight…” She wasn’t sure how to broach it, but what the heck. She had to know before the battle if there was going to be any problems on the inside. “I guess I just want to make sure you get... I mean, I know you never understood why I was with him in the first place…”

He cut her off with a quick gesture. Laid his hand over hers. “I _understand_ , now, Buffy,” he assured her. “Much understanding.” And he looked away, down at the table. Slipped his hand away to pick at the peeling old wood. 

He was just being too chill about it. It freaked her out. “And you know why I went? I mean, I know you’re probably worried about me and him. About how I can be with him, after...”

Xander’s hand shot up, forestalling her, as if he just simply didn’t have the energy to hear it. “Hey, it’s your life, Buffy. If you say this is good for you—that he’s good for you—then that’s great, huh?” With a quick nod he was up, pushing back from the table and heading out the door.

It was such a contrast to the Xander of the past that it scared her. Not that she hadn’t always kind of wished for him to say those words. ‘It’s your life, Buffy, I trust you to make your own decisions about who to date,’ was music to her ears coming from Xander Harris. But the fact was, coming from him, what it really meant was, ‘I just don’t have the energy anymore to care’.

While she stared after him, the cells of her blood turned a quick somersault, the nape of her neck perking. The shiver ran from thence down her arms, her spine, tipped her entire being slowly into a familiar, fizzing awareness. “Alright,” Spike’s voice passed her ear as he moved to sit astride the seat beside her, “now I’m worried. That was not like Harris at all.”

/Okay, where did you come from?/ It was a measure of her apprehension for her oldest remaining friend that she had been too wrapped up to even notice the buzz of her lover’s approach on anything but the most unconscious level; the drawing-close of the bond, the frisson up her spine, the _‘fight-freeze-relax’_ that meant ‘Spike’, until he was on her. /You need a bell./ “Yeah,” she agreed, staring after the departing Xander with deep concern. “Do you know I had to go after him a little while ago, because he actually went to Dracula on purpose and let himself get thralled again? Just to stop feeling the pain?”

“Sodding hell.”

“Yeah. He was all, ‘Just take it all away, Master. I’ll be your slave…’ It was sickening. When I broke him free he was actually… kind of mad at me. He cried.”

Spike’s voice twisted a bit. “Buffy, you’ve got to keep him working, keep him the hell away from the drink. He comes from alcoholics, innit?”

Her eyes shot over to his, a deeper worry entering them now. “Yeah; he used to hide from them at Willow’s. I think… things were kind of abusive there. He never said anything about it, much, but some of the stuff he did say…”

Spike nodded and pushed back a little to eye the hall through the open door. “The boy’s got a hard road. The only woman to give him the time of day is dead, and he’s got the self-esteem of three-days-dead roadkill. He’s goin’ into addictions, tryin’ to shed the pain. Right now it looks like he's tryin' to work himself to death to keep himself on the straight an' narrow, but that won't last forever."   
  
Long, pale fingertips tapped an uneasy tattoo on the table-top, and Buffy noted distantly, with surprise and not a little amusement, that they were newly-repainted with what looked like Midnight-Blue-Sheen, complete with star-glitter. Dawn had been at him then; probably because she couldn't do her own nails anymore without running out of polish after maybe two. Buffy would be touched at the adorable if she wasn't so distracted by worrying subjects like Xander Harris and Spike being all weird.   
  
"If that doesn't kill him first," Spike went on quietly, "and he falls back into it, comin’ from where he does, it’ll be far too easy for him to be lost in it again. ‘Specially here, with the pub culture. Lot of bloody drunkards, the Scots.”

Dragging her eyes away from his nails, Buffy raised an eyebrow at him. “You’re the one who never goes anywhere without a flask.”

That earned her a pointed look, as if she were being obtuse. “Yeah, but I started that after I was turned. Vampire constitution, luv. Can’t get drunk till next Tuesday ‘less I drink the town dry, or drain a drunkard as already did it for me.” He lifted his chin toward the doorway through which Xander had just disappeared. “Not that one, though. And you know what it’s like to be where he is. If he can’t find any other solace he’ll find it in a bottle, and no one will be able to tell him to stop till he destroys himself.”

/Oh. God./ She _had_ been there. The thought of Xander being where she had been a couple of years ago was terrifying.

His words came back to her now, with a haunting lilt. ‘I _understand_ , now, Buffy.’

She didn’t want him to have to understand.

***

“Did Dawn talk?” she asked him, in an attempt to get the conversation back on less depressing subjects.

“No.” Reaching out, Spike sniffed at her cup and frowned slightly as if he found her tea-making abilities below his standards, set the mug back down. “She just called me an idiot for going out in the sun, and then cried and made me feel like a right git for ever leaving.”

“Oh. Well, good.” Maybe she was still feeling a little prickly at him.

“Ta, luv,” he answered dryly. Then, after a moment, “So, how’d the meeting go? Girls all ready to do what’s needful?”

It was tough not to feel resentful at having to update him. “It was fine.” She poked at her food. “They took the news of their… blood status a little hard, but they’re ready as they’ll ever be to face down the Scourge.” Her face twisted a little as the cynicism touched her. “It’s a little easier to ignore things like an identity crisis when you have a survival one sitting there in front of you to help you put off a bunch of self-reflection.” She stabbed viciously at the edge of the Cornish pasty crust, watched it crumble uselessly away from her fork, and went after it instead with a determined scooping motion. She’d come to love that particular food enough to make it worth it. “God knows I put it off long enough; but then I had actual apocalypses—plural—to help me get away with it for years.” She shook her head then and lifted up her fork to regard the chunk of (probably) chicken at the end of the tines, dripping suet and gravy. “Not sure how. I felt so much stronger after the Master got me. And yeah. After they brought me back the second time I obviously felt different, but I just put it down to being depressed. But I think I was also stronger…”

“Damn stronger,” Spike agreed quietly, and his voice thrummed with admiration… and just a tinge of welcoming heat. 

She contemplated not eating at all at that, but not-eating really wasn’t a helpful way to go about the day, and she was admittedly pretty hungry, so she shoved the thing in her mouth. And it really was very good. Enough that she gave in and hummed a little at it as she swallowed it down

He watched her eat for a minute, a few bites going by in silence, before he grabbed her hand, fork and all, and licked a little gravy off of it, eyes closed. He had, she noticed in that moment, little scorch marks healing on his knuckles, the stupid idiot. Right. He’d been playing in the sun again. 

A curl of rage wound through her half-empty stomach, and she knocked it back with an effort because how the hell else could he have gone to visit Dawn? /Duh! Stop trying to pick a fight!/ Fought instead to watch his face as he savored the taste of her pasty. “What?”

“Haven’t had simple English food in a bloody long time, yeah?” he breathed, sounding gratified. “Christ, that’s nice.”

“Well, it’s no blood pudding.” She shuddered. “Whoever came up with that was nuts.”

He grinned pugnaciously at her. “Don’t knock tradition, pet.”

“Who would even start a tradition like that is what I want to know.”

Sliding his other leg over the bench so he could join her completely, he leaned back and crossed them at the ankle, stretching out a little. “Same reason people up here eat haggis, and people down in Mexico eat menudo, luv, and the Native folks back in the US eat fry bread.”

/Buh?/ “Okay?”

“Economics. You have a bunch of bloody lords running things, yeah? They take taxes, tell you you have to pay just to live on land you’ve farmed since before they ever set foot in the country, but they’ve the might and the swords and the men to force the issue, so you’ve got to do it. You don’t have gold, so you’re forced to pay in what you produce.” He shook his head grimly. “And they take it all; what you make in a year. Your animals, your crops… so you gotta survive on what’s left after they’ve raped you.” She stared at him, surprised at the bleakness in his tone. “The bits they didn’t want. The bad grains only good enough for soup, or for stewin’. The bits and bobs and entrails from the beasts after the butcherin’, as that’s all you can afford anymore.” He nodded at her Cornish pasty. “Suet, if you can render into somethin’ worth eating.” His lips twitched then, as he finally addressed the meat of her question. “Blood from the butcherin’ of whatever paltry lath of a beast you’ve been left, cooked hot into a cake you can eat, ‘cause it’s protein. And you roll it all up and swallow it down, stand up tall and say you’re bleedin’ proud you survived those buggers.” He waved his hand around the castle, as if to indicate Scotland at large. “You make that shite your national dish, because you outlasted the bastards. You tell everyone you love it, even, till you start to get a tooth for it yourself. Get the memories for it; till it means family and Christmas and home. So they do love it, yeah? It means pride and blood and identity, and you’ll pry it from their cold, dead hands.”

/Wow./ Sometimes she forgot how really educated Spike was under the Punk exterior. “Oh. So you’re saying every time I say something bad about blood pudding I’m insulting every English person’s great-grandmother or something?”

He smirked at her, eyebrows lifting. “I’ll forgive you this time, as my great-grandmum was fair middle-class and I was about as much a peasant as I was a prizefighter, but yeah. Don’t noise about it around the working-class, or you’ll get a fist in the nose, like as not.” 

She eyed him for a long moment, then reapplied herself to her food. “You know, speaking of getting a fist in the nose, you’d probably make a pretty good Watcher, you know that?”

He jerked back as if she’d slapped him. “Bite your bleedin’ tongue, you bitch!”

She smirked into her tray. “Haven’t called me that in a really long time.”

“Haven’t insulted me in ages!”

“What, calling you an idiot doesn’t count?” Okay, so there had a few barbs in that last, and maybe he had a right to narrow his eyes at her as if wondering where that had come from. She tried to ignore the look, loading the ‘tattie scoon’ in her hand with a bunch of clotted cream (Scotland’s answer to butter) and jam. Took a huge, satisfying bite, and let her eyes fall shut in appreciation. Who knew you could make such a tasty breakfast pastry out of a potato?

“We havin’ a problem, Slayer?” Spike asked quietly.

His tense voice penetrated her enjoyment of the food, and she sighed as she set the thing down and reached for her tea. Took a sip to clear her throat, mourning as she did that she hadn’t asked for her allotment of coffee for today. She could’ve used it, but they had kind of a rationing thing going here when it came to coffee, and she wanted to save it for later if the battle started. 

With a sigh, she turned to her guy and faced him dead on. “Why didn’t you want to come to the meeting with me? Really.”

He remained very still for an exceedingly long period, watching her like she had asked him a thoroughly complicated math question. “I told you,” he answered finally, as if she had lost her damn mind. “I figured you needed to talk to them first without me…”

She leaned in, swift and fierce, and poked him hard in the chest. “And I thought we were _partners!”_

He gaped at her. “We are! But you’re the bloody _Slayer_ , Buffy!”

/Just, _what?_ Of _course_ I am, but what the hell does that have to do with anything?/ “Dammit, Spike, what the hell’s going on between us right now?”

He frowned uncertainly, taken aback. “What do you mean?” He shook his head like a dog coming out of a pond, and she had never seen him look so off-balance. “You’re not making any bloody sense.”

Okay, that cut it, and she surged to her feet. “No,” she hissed, and now frustration was making her rage. She contained it with an effort, just this side of starting a serious fight. _“You’re_ not making any sense.”

Spike rose too; a smooth, sinuous movement that was all narrowed eyes and barely-contained fury. Grabbed her arm, which, really, buster? “Can we talk about this somewhere where everyone’s _not_ watching us?” he growled, low and dangerous.

She stared around her, aware very suddenly that every eye in the sparsely-populated room was on them, and yeah. Okay. Probably not the best way to introduce her baby Slayers to her intimate relationship with a mostly-tamed vampire by letting them see her get into a knockdown-dragout with him on the cafeteria floor.

“Fine,” she spat, and pulled away to turn for the door with as much decorum as she could manage under the circumstances.

He grabbed up her tray of half-eaten food and followed, a pace behind and to her left, as always. He was stiff and tense as a curtain rod but holding himself in vibrating check until they were out of sight; so much so that the tray didn’t even rattle as they swept out of the room. The action melted her ire a little, because the jerk always wanted to keep her fed before a battle, and damn him, would he never stop trying to take care of her? Even when they were about to seriously throw down? 

They made it all the way back upstairs to their room before getting into it. In fact, the long walk had cooled Buffy’s fighting ardor enough that she had even managed to organize her thoughts a little. Maybe it had done the same for Spike, because he just waited, quietly setting aside the tray and turning to face her without a word. 

Except after a second he grabbed at his duster, tore it off, threw it across the foot of the bed in a sharp, angry gesture, and okay. Maybe not so much with the calmed down. 

“Okay,” she breathed, trying for diplomacy. “I’m sorry. I just don’t get it. I thought…”

Unfortunately he started in at precisely the same instant. “I just don’t fucking get you, Buffy! What the bloody hell do you _want_ from me?”

They both trailed off at the exact same time, staring at each other through the intervening space. With a groan, Buffy threw up her hands and fell back onto the bed, disarmed. Spike must have been equally exasperated, because he flung himself into the one chair with an angry huffing sound like a stupid freight train, and looked away, a muscle ticcing away in his jaw. 

They remained silent for a long moment, her watching him and him staring at the wall. Finally she looked down into her palms, her fingers pressed together. “I guess I just thought… I mean, I know things are different here, but… It’s _you_ _and_ _me_ , Spike. After everything we’ve built, I thought at least that part wouldn’t change. That no matter what, we’d stay…” His head jerked around, eyes seeking her out in startled surprise, and damn it, she couldn’t afford the stupid emotional-ness that always threatened to swamp her so easily now, since Hell-A. Not here. But it was there despite, threatening, behind her eyes and in her throat. She swallowed it down with vast effort. “I probably could do it all without you, but I really don’t want to anymore. I don’t want to be… that. And I guess I never stopped to think…” /God./ “That maybe you don’t want to keep being… That maybe you don’t want to be _that_ for me, here, because of the way they’ll…” She bit her lip, trying to think of all the possibilities. To get them all out past the stupid barrier of her not-so-articulate Buffyisms. “Or, I guess…”

She never got to finish her stumbled explanation. He was already up on his feet and crossing to her, the breath exiting his lips in a startled, “Oh, bloody Christ, Buffy, I’m sorry.” Was squatting before her, catching up her hands. “Listen. I’m a sodding fool, alright? You’re right. I’m an idiot. I had it all wrong, yeah?”

She watched him with a faint sense of shock, wondering what had caused this abrupt turnaround, or really, how he had managed to get anything meaningful out of what she’d said at all, back there. “What?” she whispered. He was probably excellent at this point at translating Buffy-speak, but she wasn’t sure how he’d gotten from her ‘I’m sorry’ to completely blaming himself. “No, listen…”

He lifted one hand to touch her lips, expression rueful. She fell silent, because his eyes on hers were just so incredibly soft and deep that she thought she could fall right in. “I _loved_ it, there,” he told her quietly. “Standing right by your side. Never thought…” He lifted one of her hands. Kissed the knuckles gently, the little healing scorch-marks on his own knuckles making her belly turn over with faint nausea. “Never thought I’d have that with you; anywhere. But I thought, once we came back, I had to give it up.”

/Wait, what? _Why?_ /

“And I was okay with that, yeah? I’m fine with stepping back. Supporting you. Figure that’s my place.”

/Oh. Oh, you idiot…/

His face twisted a little, clearly reading her expression. “No, I mean it. I don’t want to make it harder on you, Love, or make you have to choose, because I know you’ll always have to choose the world first and me second…”

Okay, she could get why he would think that, but she thought they’d already _covered_ this, and she could just really be so mad at him right now if she didn’t know _why_ , and, just… /Oh my _God_ , Spike, you make me want to strangle you sometimes!/

“…And especially with the business of the blood, and tryin’ to explain me to the bitty Slayers an’ all, I thought…”

/Okay, dammit!/ “Spike…”

“It’s alright, Buffy,” he whispered. “I know what you’re givin’ up to be with me. And it’s more than I ever thought I’d get. I never thought I’d get to have you at all. Comin’ in second to the world? Christ, that you let me take care of you when no one’s watching is my greatest honor, but I’m not askin’ for you to…”

“Just shut up,” she told him fiercely, and seized his face. Pulled him in close. Why was he always so self-denigrating? Had his mouth before he could quite understand what she intended, and was dragging him up over her as she laid back, so that his hands came down on either side of her body just to stabilize the fall. Slid her arms around his neck to keep him close while she sank into the kiss; startled on his part, but amenable and quickly sliding into an eyes-closed flush of paradise and a low moan of surrender. “God, you’re wonderful,” she told him then, shoving him away. Grabbed the hem of his shirt and yanked it determinedly over his head. “And stupid.”

“Alright?” he asked, clearly confused, if always happy to go along with any conversation that ended up with him inside of her.

They were going to have to finish this discussion, but right now she was at a loss for words. Her body had taken over. /Stupid, stupid vampire/ was all she could really think. /I love you, you stupid, beautiful vampire./ So she grabbed his hand, pointedly shoved it at her shirt, and went to work on his belt.

“Alright,” he whispered, and set about disrobing her with swift economy. Not opposed, it seemed, to continuing the conversation horizontally for the moment, on the unspoken agreement that they would resume the verbal debate once more whenever she could think straight again. Once her shirt was disposed of, his mouth came down with his usual ludicrous skill do amazing things to her neck, her throat, her collarbone, and drive her breath from her lungs. 

His tongue, teasing at his bite, made her jerk. Lent speed to her fingers, and she had his pants undone and down off his hips before he could escape. He was already moving away and down though, his body absconding from her charge before she could get the stupid jeans past his ass, which was just not acceptable. “Dammit, come back here,” she growled, digging her nails into his shoulder blades, trying to catch him with her feet. 

He returned obligingly, watching her for a sign. She scrabbled at his jeans, huffing in frustration, and he hunched to scoot out of them, kicking them and his boots helpfully away. Waited for further instructions, eyebrow cocked. She rolled her eyes at him. “I just wanted to feel you.”

He grinned then, if still with a slightly sober light in his eyes. Slipped away once more, lips trailing over her body. Mouth caught for a while on one nipple and an arm cocked around her to roll the other in a firm demand for attention till she arched toward him with a breathless curse; and dammit, he needed to get her out of her stupid jeans.

“Patience, luv…”

“I’ll show you patience…” Any minute she was going to flip him right over and have her way with him and he was just going to have to deal with it.

He snorted a laugh. “Any way you want it, pet.” Did a little nibble-lick-kiss over one of her lower ribs. Dipped his tongue into her belly-button, and okay, that was just a waste of talent. 

Exasperated, she shoved her hands against his shoulders and threw him over on his back. Straddled him and started ripping at the button of her pants. “You jerk.”

He was chuckling in earnest now; maybe out of relief for the intermission in their tense, emotional faceoff, or maybe because he just liked laughing at her when she got all desperate for his mouth. The first one she could forgive, but the second one was just unfair, since it was completely his stupid fault she was a total addict. “You need to shut up. As far as my body’s concerned we haven’t _nearly_ caught up on the two years and whatever change since we used to do this all the time, so…”

His hands caught her by the hips like a vise, all laughter abruptly fled from face and eyes. “Buffy, on whatever timeline, I will serve you and glad, from here till the day I dust. Come here.”

She let herself be dragged up his body, groaned when his hands tugged hard against the waistband of the jeans, the underwear, dragging them both down roughly enough to scrape her hips and betray his own leftover distress. “…Get you out of these bloody things, get my mouth on that incomparable quim, have you screaming; Christ, love the taste and the scent of you, like lemons and peaches and sunshine, I could _live_ on you, Buffy…” 

Somehow and with minimal awkwardness she clambered out of the clothes, and he threw them violently away. And promptly started to nuzzle into her pubic bone, arms locked tight around her waist and already about halfway to that place where the imagery faded and he stopped making sense. Where the poet ended and the demon began, and where it was all so meltingly _good_. He dragged in a deep, snuffling breath that made everything ache in her from her belly down, and left her tingling in all the right places. “Fucking Christ, Buffy,” he groaned, and lay back, fingers digging deep into the muscles of her ass. “Drown me in you.”

He made her shake. She grabbed on hard to the thick, heavy headboard as she scooted over his face; dug her fingers into the fine old wood as he dragged her down. And bit her lip, hard, when he dove in with a little, fierce head-shake that said he was already half-gone. “Ohhhh… God…”

He growled something unintelligible; an act that curled her toes, her feet, about half her body. “Fuck.”

An amused sound, and another growl, because he was torturous, and his hands dragged her down harder onto his tongue. Rocked her as he swept her from anus to clit, making her twitch and gasp, and that just wasn’t _fair_. “Do you think…” She managed, choking a little.

“Mmmm?”

Why was she being shy? She felt dumb, but… Okay. “It’s been a really long time since we…”

Another amused sound, and his right hand came up. His face slipped briefly away, which sucked, but then he was swirling two fingers around against basically everything, which was awesome and teasing and unfair, and… yes, dammit, he did a quick thrust inside of her just to let her know he was willing to give her all of it if that was what she wanted… And then he was dragging her back to his mouth, and his fingers were sliding back, one of them prodding gently, slick and damp, against the bud of her ass, making her tremble at the sparks of sensation. 

His mouth always made this so good, and her body had definitely not forgotten. It so hadn’t and why hadn’t they gotten back to this sooner? She jerked against his fingers, throbbing. Pushed against him, breath exploding from her in a rush when his finger slid in, and, / _God!_ /

He just waited there for a minute, letting her acclimate. It had, after all, been a hell of a while. Of course, his mouth never stopped, which made everything more interesting; made her thrum with heat and a confusing welter of sensations. But it all sorted itself out quickly, because long time or no, she _had_ had practice. When she relaxed, he quirked the finger to pull her down harder against his mouth… and began to thrust gently in time to the rhythm of his tongue, and _god,_ this wasn’t going to take long. “I like… arguing with you… a lot better… this way…” she managed, unable to keep from rising and falling on the beat of his tongue, his hand.

He freed his mouth for a second, to her small, disappointed noise of protest. “We still arguing, pet?”

“No,” she told him firmly, and dragged his face back by his hair. His chuckle reverberated against her clit, causing her to throw her head back with a gasp. Which also, by extension, caused her to rock back onto his finger, which, just, damn. “Lay me down?” she half pled. “I want you everywhere when I come…” She was already quaking all over.

He disengaged to slide up, his left hand wrapping around her back. “Always my pleasure.” And then he was back between her knees, and she couldn’t help it. She was rolled up like some kind of sardine or something, trying to contain all the sensations, because he had slipped probably two fingers inside her pussy, which on top of everything else, was almost too much but so _good,_ and the pressure of that plus what he was already doing, slow and measured…

And then somehow he got his mouth back on her, because he was a damn genius, and she was arching up, and bucking, and probably screaming, and they were in a castle full of Slayers who didn’t trust a vampire, and she needed to tone it down or they were liable to have a whole squad of them come tear-assing through the door any second to demand he unhand her…

Of course that thought was enough to set her off giggling, even in the midst of her orgasm, which confused the hell out of Spike, and he sat back at the end, watching her with an expression not unlike a person watching animals screwing on the nature channel… Which of course just served to send her off on further jags of near-crying laughter, and he was going to think…

“I’m sorry,” she whispered as the stomach-straining peals finally wore off into whimpers. “It’s just…” She waved a hand vaguely at the door and affected a stern voice. “‘Unhand her, vampire!’” And she couldn’t help it; lost it again, rolling around on the bed so hard that she slipped his fingers. “Un… _hand_ …”

He just shook his head, though a small smile touched his lips. “I think you’ve lost the plot, Slayer. Strain’s too much for you, is it?”

“Speaking of strain,” she gasped, and rolling up, made a fortunate grab for his bobbing cock. 

“Oi!” He eyed her warily, breathing hard through his nose. “Careful handling the goods, luv! You’ve a strong bloody grip!”

“You love it. Come here.” She gave him an inviting tug and, releasing him, dropped back once more. Held out her arms and flicked her fingers to indicate he occupy recently-vacated space forthwith. He complied, still watching her a little cautiously, as if she were some sort of unpredictable beast. “Calm down. I’m not going to hurt you.” She smiled significantly at his equipment. “Much.” Give credit where it was due, said equipment looked altogether a lot less concerned about the fine print than was Spike himself. /Jeez, Spike. You’d think you didn’t wanna get laid./

He rolled his eyes. “Love it when you hurt me a little and you know it. Just not sure about this mood you’re in, luv. Makes a bloke a little suspicious, yeah?”

“Oh, c’mon. What, you think I’m gonna take revenge on you because I was mad at you like forever ago?”

“Twenty bloody minutes, maybe, Slayer. Strange are the ways of a woman…”

“Shut up and get inside me.”

He lowered himself, eyes now steady and intense on hers. Caught himself in hand. She lifted up to meet him, and he slid home with a low groan. “Bloody fuck…”

She moaned a little at the feel of him. It was always so close to too much, after she came; but so good. Surged up, wrapping arms and legs tight around him so that he couldn’t move. Dug her nails into his ribs… and proceeded to torment his nipples, his collarbone with her teeth and tongue.

“See,” he groaned, twitching up in an abortive attempt to thrust. “Sodding revenge…”

“Shh,” she told him. “Sit still. I’m trying to return the favor.”

“Trying to bleeding wreck me…”

“You’ll live. Shh.”

He was silent for an extremely long time, not breathing, while she asked his body questions. Her only answers came in the form of little twitches from his skin, and from his cock, jerking faintly inside her as he fought to hold it together every time she released her mouth’s hard, sucking hold, and the blood came rushing back. Up again. And down. Over, and over. 

Then, abruptly, his long-held breath exploded out of him. “Christ, Buffy; and they call _me_ evil!”

/Oh, fine./ She pushed him back, shifting so she could straddle him, and rocked her hips the way he liked best. “I love you, you dope.”

His eyes blazed as he watched her, hands locked on her hips and thrusting up fiercely. “Love. You. So. Bloody. Much. You. Insane. Bird…” She twisted her hips, relentlessly. “Fuck!”

She loved owning him. Loved especially the moments when his arrogant expression became lost in awe and wonder and desperate need. “You’re gonna come for me any second.”

“Whenever you want, luv,” he half-moaned, eyes falling shut.

“No, keep your eyes open.” 

His lids snapped up, blue gaze sharpening on hers and glowing with reverence. 

“You're gonna let me watch you come apart…”

He snapped up harder and faster, losing his rhythm. “Buffy…”

“But not yet.” 

He groaned, fought to still himself, rein himself back to her pace. But his fingers were flexing on her hips, twitching in a trembling way that said he wasn’t going to hold it together much longer. 

She stopped completely, bent over to balance herself on her hands when he moaned. Looked right into his eyes. And clenched down hard on him; once…

“Jesus Fuck.”

Twice…

“Oh, Christ… _please_ , Buffy!”

She lowered herself… and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Come for me now,” she whispered, and clenched his cock hard.

“Fuck, bloody fuck, sodding, buggering _Christ_ …” 

The cool rush of his release calmed the heated throbbing inside her, and she settled back against him, relaxed and still. “I love to feel you.”

He jerked up again, once, and subsided, trembling. “Love to hear you talk," he murmured into her hair. "You never did… Love it when you tell me all the things you never used to say, Buffy.”

She trailed a slow hand down his gorgeous chest, cool against her palm. /I never used to be able to say them. But now I can, and that’s…/ “I want you with me. Through all of it.”

He stilled; till even the breath of him was silent. Then, “And if they ask?”

She didn’t hesitate. “This is who we are. I’m not going to lie about it. And I’m not going to make excuses.” Reaching down, she caught his right hand where it lay now, limp alongside her leg. Pulled it up and in, laid his fingers against his bite, thrumming slow with her steadying pulse on the inside of her thigh. Shivered with it, wishing for the mirror of it on the other side. Definitely more of those to come; to make up for the ones they’d lost to the closing loop of time. Tugged his hand up next, brought it to her neck, and shivered when his fingers brushed, held at his mark there. More to come upstairs too, to cancel the ones she didn’t want. The ones that _were_ failures. But not his. “I’m in a very serious relationship with a vampire. I’m not hiding it, and I’m not ashamed.” /Maybe I used to be when it came to you, because I didn’t understand; you, or myself. But you’re gonna know what it feels like for me to be not-ashamed. For me to be with you the way I was the first time around. Sure and unafraid. For me to give you as close as I can to that certainty I had then, before I thought I had to take everything back; when I was just running on instinct, and I'd never been hurt, yet. Because for years you had to put up with the backwash of the me that _was_ hurt, even though it wasn't you who did the hurting./ 

/You deserve to know what it's like to be with the me who has no doubts. And I think, finally... I've come full-circle on that. I think I can finally give that to you./   
  
Lifting herself a little to look him directly in the eyes, she let him see the unwavering certainty she held there for him, now. “Where we are doesn’t change that for me, okay?”

His eyes were open on hers now, liquid and awed, but still assessing. “And if it means the chits think it’s something they should start exploring next?”

She sighed. Lowered her body back down to his. “I have to live my life. I can’t keep destroying myself for the greater good; or you. I learned that the year we started this, with everyone telling me I should be ashamed, till I was stupid enough to let you go.” She shook her head. “It wrecked us before we could find out what we could be. And… losing you…” She bit her lip. “I won’t be able to do the work.” She ran light, stroking fingers along his sculpted chest, thoughtful and quiet. “Without you, I can’t do this. I’ve learned that. I’d keep looking for someone to hold me together. Keep spiraling out of control into some deeper mess, because this is what I need. Someone who _understands_. Who understands _me_ , and that’s _you_. It’s _always_ been you. Someone to help keep me steady while the world falls apart…” She made a face against him. “And we all know that’s not gonna stop happening.”

“Not ruddy likely.” His voice was tight at the thought that she might ever choose another to hold her in one piece. She would disabuse him of that notion now.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s hard, or it’s awkward, or even if it’s dangerous. I want it to be you. I _need_ it to be you. No one else fits me, Spike.” She had long since learned that too, didn’t miss the sharp intake of his breath as she let him know it. “So if that means dealing with weird gray areas like trying to figure out how to still be a leader, and knowing that Dawn’s going to take a page out of my book and start parking with vamps…”

Predictably, he growled in memory. “Bleedin’ stupid, that was.”

“And my fault. She grew up watching me with Angel, then watching me with you. How was she supposed to know that she didn’t have the tools to navigate it, or that it was dumb to try it with a fledge…”

His growl pitched up, irate and protective, because he was the most complete older brother when it came to Dawn, whether she had ever realized it before or not. 

She trailed light fingers over his throat to chill him out. “And now, probably because of me and growing up with what I am, in my world, she’s dating demons, and I just have to be glad she’s settled on some slightly less dangerous types…”

He didn't calm overmuch. “Bloody mollusk…” he bitched. But at least the snarling had subsided.

She propped herself up on his chest to watch his face. “No argument. But that’s where I’m at, Spike, don’t you see? I was already doing it with Dawn. I can do it with the baby Slayers, too. No, this isn’t something they should be doing, probably—we’re not, like, a case study of how they should be living their lives if they want to last long—but now they know how they work… they might feel like they want to.”

Spike rubbed his left hand over his face (incidentally probably making his face smell even more like her 'quim', but then that was nothing really new for him). “And then some of the bloody stupid bints’ll die, and you’ll blame yourself.”

Buffy sighed and tossed her head to get her hair out of her face. It didn’t work, and Spike moved to brush it away for her before it could fall into her mouth. “They’re not Potentials. They’re not going to die as easy, and they have the warning bells. If Vi and Rona and the rest could watch us and then come into their own and realize it isn’t necessarily the best idea for them…”

“Bints also have a drive to ‘em the Potentials didn’t have, yeah? They get it into their heads to try, some idiot vamp gets a taste of Slayer blood… Frenzy takes ‘em the wrong way, and you lose half the brood.”

/God, are you for or against?/ She could go down a rabbit hole with this, lose her mind… or she could live her life and do her best to mitigate the damage. “I need you, Spike. That’s what it comes down to. And we can’t hide this. So I’ll have to explain it to them. Make sure they get it. That this so shouldn’t be the norm. That most vamps aren’t exactly in touch enough with their human side to have a functional relationship with a person whose demon side inspires all the grr. That we’re a one-off; even if I’ve somehow tried it twice, because obviously the other one wasn’t all sunshine and roses…”

A grim note entered his voice, and he narrowed his eyes to catch her with a pointed gaze. “Better tell ‘em the truth about us, then, too.”

She ignored him. “And I’ll make sure they know that, yeah. Pure humans probably won’t do it for ‘em, but if they need to get their jollies off and make their demon-sides happy, they’re gonna have to do it with each other, or find a nice, tame demon, like an Ano-Movic or something.”

She was answered with a derisive snort. 

“I’m just saying.”

He was quiet for a long moment, then, “This doesn’t mean I shouldn’t still be in the background. They’re gonna resent it if you bring me in as part of the leadership, luv. They don’t know me at all. To them I’m just a vamp you’re fucking. Include me in the councils and that’ll end up losing you cred with the birds, and you need to keep the upper hand with a lot of contentious firebrands like these.” He narrowed his eyes at her. “I know Slayers, and this isn’t Sunnyhell. Had something left of a rep back there, since they’d fought me. I could shout down the Scoobies if I needed to, to back you up. Bunch of puffed-up humans and a witch or two; but these chits…”

“Spike.” She laid a hand along his cheek. “You’ll be my personal counselor.”

“Oh, bloody hell.”

She propped herself up on his chest, cupped her chin, smiled down at him in cheerful challenge. “Vampire consultant of all things demon-y?”

He gaped at her, automatically warding off her elbows so that she toppled back down onto his chest. “Sodding fuck, Slayer; you think they’ll buy that? They’re just gonna call nepotism because I’m your side piece; and the minute they see you’re letting me bite you, any credit you’ve built with the chits goes out the window. I’ll be banned from the council along with any of my bleeding demon insights, and anything you say from then on out will be discredited as well.”

Diverted, she pushed herself back up to stare at him in amazement. “Did you just call yourself a side-piece? Who’s the… front piece in this scenario?”

“I’m serious, Slayer. Dammit, Buffy…”

“No, _I’m_ serious.” She sat up on his hips, frowning. “Who the hell do you think they think I should be fucking?”

He rolled his eyes at her as if she were blind, or a moron. “Harris, obviously.”

_“What?”_

“You work well together, you have that intimacy that comes from history, you’re close, you’ve got years together; enough to practically finish each other’s sentences. No doubt that’s enough for most to believe it.”

She buried her face in one hand. “Oh, God… Do you think they actually _think_ that?”

He lifted one hand and dropped it away; a defeatist gesture she could _feel_. “Eventually you would have, Love, if only out of sheer loneliness.”

That got her peering at him from between two fingers. “Spike, it’s _Xander!_ I can’t think of him that way; it doesn’t make any _sense!”_

“You’re comfortable with him. He knows you in a way no one does who’s left, aside from me; knows what makes you tick, what you’ve been and done and seen. You don’t have to pretend with him the way you would with anyone else.” His candid analysis went pointed, stark. “And you’re a hot-blooded woman who’s shite at spending time alone with her hand. Eventually you’d’ve turned to him just out of sod all other options. Wouldn’t’ve come out right, but you’d’ve tried it.”

“This conversation is making me really uncomfortable.”

He snorted grimly. “Well, forget we ever had it then, and just say a lot of the birds are gonna think you made a shite choice, between the two of us.”

“Oh, God…” She pulled her hand away from her face to glare at him. “When did you get to be so damn good at politics, anyway?”

He grabbed her under the arms and yanked her back down onto his chest. “Ever tried to survive in a demon nest run by the likes of Angelus?”

“No. Thank God."

“Well, then.”

She laid on him for a while, listening to the purling quiet of his body, then sighed. “I still want to try it. If you want to. I don’t want to turn back time with us.”

She felt his arm rise. Hesitate. Then his left hand descended, slow and steady, to stroke her hair. “Maybe we find a middle ground. Use this bitty war as a way to test the waters, see how your leadership and Harris take it. Go from there.”

She nodded slightly, lips moving against his chest. “I’d really like that, Spike.”

The silence lengthened before he spoke again. “Brave new world we’re building out here, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

She wondered at the disquiet that seemed to enter his voice as he said it.

***  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Alright, then. Now that that's seen to...  
*hearts*  
  
PS: anyone who's Scottish on here might hate on me for this, but seriously, Irn Bru?   
I think Scots drink it just to prove the national character or something. To hell with haggis. That stuff's surprisingly yummy. But Irn Bru is Scotland's answer to Coke-a-Cola and is, as far as I can determine, made by pouring something effervescent into a pitted girder under the moonlight in a contaminated former work-site, stirring it till it gathers just the right amount of toxicity and begins to glow in the dark and take on that rusty sheen, and then is tossed back to put hair on your chest or something.   
It terrifies me.   
(Don't hate me Scotland. I LOVE YOU. Tattie Scones and fried Mars Bars and watching the sun rise under Arthur's Seat and smelling the wind blowing off the moors into Inverness and walking on a hillside on terraces that date to the Bronze Age... YUMMY.  
But Irn Bru is scary.)


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize to everyone yet again for not getting back to y'all yet. It's been crazy in RL-town. I promise comment-responses soonest. You're all amazing and I appreciate you tons.
> 
> Best to get on with the lead-in to the battle, innit?

They should get up. She had work to do. Rounds to make. Inspections…

Spike's fingers trailed lightly, ticklishly in the valley between her breasts, and she stilled back to immobility, eyes falling closed. /At least I made it to sitting-on-the-edge-of-the-bed this time./

“Why’nt you get a room with a window in it, Buffy?”

The question took her by surprise, and her eyes popped open to regard him curiously. “Huh?”

He jerked his chin back toward the wall. “I wasn’t here. No reason to take an inside room. You had to have had your pick of the place.”

She looked around her at the chamber, as if seeing it for the first time. Frowned at the walls. “It feels safe. Defensible. Comforting.” She pushed herself away from him, to her feet, and ignored her sticky thighs to walk toward the wall furthest from the door. A window would have been there, if this was a room on the outside wall. “Bright lights shining in mean danger, now,” she whispered. “Fire and death. When your clock is gone…” She turned back around to face him, one hand lightly brushing the wall behind her. “Some of my best times have been in the dark and the quiet, in concrete and cool stone. At night, where the sun can’t find me.”

“Bloody hell, luv. Some of your most dangerous, too.”

She smiled and shook her head at him. “The last time I made love with you, before you died, was in a basement. You didn’t know that was what I was trying to do, but…”

He was up and closing with her, pain written on his face for misadventures of the past. “I was a blind git stuck in my own worthless feelings. I can’t sodding believe you’re locking yourself away from the sun because you wanted to remember a night like that, with only one of us there…”

She lifted her hand, touched his lips. “We were both there,” she told him fervently. “Things just don’t always go so well when I do all the talking.”

“You do alright.” A genuine, awed smile touched his lips. “I seem to remember you sayin’ a whole hell of a lot in only a few words the night you found the Scythe, yeah?”

“And you said a whole lot more before that. And all that happened in the dark, too.” She met his expression with her own warmth. “The dark is ours, Spike. I can go hang out in the sun if I need to, but when I want to think of you; of us…” She waved her hand around. “This is where I find peace.” She shook her head a little. “For a long time, it was the only time I could.”

“Till Hell-A?”

Her smile widened. “Yeah. The stupid sun never went down, there. I had to get to know us all over again in the light.”

He grinned. “And now?”

“I’m okay with both. But I still like owning the dark with you.” She touched the center of his chest lightly. “It’s more intimate, somehow.”

He dropped his forehead to hers, and they stood that way for a moment, naked in the gloom. Finally, though, he sighed and rolled his head to the side. “You should finish your food, pet. Know you have things to get to.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” She moved reluctantly away from him to approach the plate with her now-cold meal. Poked at the unappetizing mess with a grimace. “This is the one big problem with having you around, you know. You shoot my motivation all to hell.” /Way bigger issue than all this politics and blood stuff./

He smirked behind her, rolling his tongue. She could hear it in his voice. “I could always get your motor runnin’ and then leave you wantin’. That should keep you powered up for a spell.”

She shivered a little. Glared at him over her shoulder as she popped a piece of soggy, gravy-soaked crust into her mouth. “Don’t you ever dare.” /Damn tongue like a damn advertisement all the time./

He went on smirking as he stepped into his jeans. “What? Don’t want the bitty birds to see you lose it and jump my bones in the middle of the courtyard?”

She gave up on the remains of the pasty and went instead for the rest of the scone. It would probably taste better cold. “Think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”

He tugged his shirt over his head and emerged, eyes dancing. “Know you, Slayer.”

She had to admit, if only privately, that he was probably right when it came to that imaginary scenario. “Throw me my pants?”

He bent to sweep them up, tossed them her way. She caught them one-handed, cramming the remainder of the scone into her mouth in one huge bite, then did a little wrestling to convince the tangled mess of jeans and underwear to go back into a wearable shape. Stepped in, then sighed before pulling them up. “I’m not gonna fool anyone for long wandering around smelling like a vampire’s sex toy.” Her head jerked up and she mock-glared at him. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I smell like a treat…”

“Wasn’t gonna say, but yeah.”

Making a face, she shuffled awkwardly over to the laundry basket she’d left behind five days and four-and-a-half months ago, poked around inside for something she didn’t mind using as a makeshift towel. Ignored his mock-mournful sigh as she mopped herself up and tossed the soiled article back in. “One dumb thing about living in a castle is the lack of nearby bathrooms.”

“Least there are any. Beats hell, innit?”

He had a point. She would take the accessible freshwater over that gross, clumpy ooze, any day. “Alright. Back to work, I guess.” She bent over and snatched up her discarded shirt, then eyed him thoughtfully as she pulled it on. “You want the grand tour?”

He tilted his head. “Ready to start integratin’ me, is it?”

He was like a three-year-old when he was lonely and bored. No way in hell was she going to risk the chaos he could wreak if she just wandered off and left him to his own devices. “If I leave you alone for too long, you’re going to start getting into trouble.”

She hoped he didn’t think she was going to buy that innocent expression he was waving around. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”

***

He seemed impressed enough with their makeshift control room. “Bit more high-tech than I expected in here.”

“Yeah. Wiring it for the electricity is a full-time job, or so says the handyman deluxe-slash-Watcher.”

That caught his interest. “Yeah? Harris is a Watcher now, is he?”

“Yeah. He’s been sharing his voice of experience.” 

“S’pose he qualifies by now.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Peroxide-Boy.” The epithet was used without any bite as Xander drew level with them and nodded proudly at his wall-o-screens. “I’d say this totally looks like something from an evil lair—like Dr. Claw’s office in _Inspector Gadget_ , maybe—except we’re the good guys here, so maybe not.”

“Keep livin’ the nerd dream, Harris.” The return gibe also lacked heat. 

/What is this? Needling each other for old times’ sake? Getting to know you again through the language of insults?/

“Oh, ‘cause _Passions_ was high entertainment,” Xander returned blandly.

/Guess so./

“You forgot to mention _Dawson’s Creek_ and _The Price is_ bloody _Right_.” Spike pulled out a cigarette and glanced at Buffy in silent question. She lifted a pointed brow at the brand-new electronics, and he sighed and folded it back into his palm, prepared to wait till they moved on to more external parts of the tour to light up. 

Xander turned away from his myriad screens to face them, opened his mouth to let out his next easy retort… and stopped dead. The light from the bank of monitors lit Spike’s face in a blue-white glare, washing out what little coloring he had. Obviously the slight hints of tan he’d picked up in Hell-A had vanished with the closing of the time-loop, but even that might have been canceled out by this light. It definitely seriously highlighted his glass-cut features, which was always nice. 

Something about seeing him this way had apparently struck Xander hard, though, for he was gaping as if he had witnessed the inexplicable or the truly shocking. “Spike, are you wearing _makeup?”_

/Oh./ She supposed he still had some remains of kohl around his eyes. Buffy barely noticed it anymore unless it was freshly applied. Xander must have missed the faded addition last night because it had been so dark outside. Not to mention that his general depression made it tough for him to key in on much of anything when he was in one of his overwork spells.

Spike seemed kind of thrown by the question. “What?” He touched his eyelid. “Oh. Yeah.” He thrust his chin out belligerently. “What of it?”

Xander was clearly completely thrown. “I just… Isn’t that kind of… emo for a Punk guy?”

Spike turned to Buffy, obviously incensed. “Can I hit him, Slayer? Just a little?”

“Fine, no-more-chip-guy. Bring it on.” The mildly pugnacious reply turned querulous. “But I mean… like you don’t already have the big blues, without all that. Seriously?”

Buffy rolled her eyes at the both of them. “I put it on him. It’s warpaint, Xander. Kind of a long story, but if you don’t want to get in a fight, I’d leave it alone.”

Xander turned the stare on her now, looking poleaxed. “You don’t mind dating a guy who wears _makeup?”_

/Oh for God’s sake./ “It never bothered me before that he wore nail polish. Where’ve you been?”

That seemed to throw him. “Well, yeah, but… that’s black. It’s… hardcore. Even if he let Dawnie put it on him sometimes. But the eye thing seems… kinda gay.”

Spike exhaled in a very put-upon way. “Fucksake, Harris, the only thing that’s gay is gettin’ horizontal with another bloke. Other than that, everything else is fair game. Even that’s fair game if you wanna go that route, so maybe your problem is you’re confused about what you want in life, yeah? I’d do some soul-searchin’ if I were you, a bit of eyeliner gettin’ you so hot and bothered.”

“I… What?”

Buffy grinned and decided to join in with a little gentle needling. “This is the second time you’ve called Spike pretty, Xander. There something you wanna tell us?”

He swung around to gape at her. _“What?”_

Spike’s mild ire faded abruptly into amused interest. “Hold on, then; when did Harris start talkin’ me up? Was I out that day?”

“It was when they saw you and the bot and thought it was me. He said he got why I’d go there, because you’re…” She frowned, trying to remember the words. “Strong and mysterious and compact and… well-muscled, I think. He was very complimentary.”

Spike’s gaze shot over to Xander, looking kind of puffed up. “Well, hey now, Harris. Never knew you cared! Thanks for the praise, mate, you’re not so bad yourself.”

“Oh, shut up, Spike,” Xander mumbled, looking away. His face was really, really red. “I have eyes, okay? Or, eye, anyway. I know why chicks dig a guy who looks like you.”

Spike’s smirk widened devilishly. “Some blokes, too.”

“Okay, you know what? I don’t have to take this.” He turned to leave. 

“Xander.” Buffy caught his arm. “We’re just messing with you. Just… don’t poke at the eyeliner and no one pokes back, okay?”

“Yeah, fine.” He grumbled something about touchy vampires and wandered off, waving a hand in the air.

Spike watched him go for a moment, then shook his head. “Lad could maybe stand for a bit of being buggered. Might improve his disposition a little.”

“Okay, so not something I need to think about when it comes to Xander.”

“Don’t begrudge the boy, Buffy. Everyone needs to loosen up and have a good time once in a bit.” He frowned and tapped his unlit cigarette in his palm. “Maybe he’s just anxious. No doubt Anya had him well in hand before, knowing that chit.”

“Seriously, Spike. _Really_ don’t want to talk about Xander’s sex life.”

The frown vanished, mischief taking its place. “Not asking you to do him, luv. Fact, rather you didn’t.”

“Spike, if you don’t shut up I swear to God I’ll dust you.” 

Grinning all-too-provocatively, he snapped his mouth shut. 

She watched him for a long moment to make sure he wasn’t going to start any more trouble, then grabbed a handful of leather sleeve and dragged him toward the door. “Come out and smoke, and I’ll tell you about the training regimen. I need to do an inspection anyway. And stop driving me nuts.”

“It’s my job, pet.”

She didn’t dignify that with a response.

Once outside the main exit, they surveyed the courtyard briskly. The day was way too bright for Scotland—she’d never been here before in the summer, but it seemed kind of excessive compared to the weather all the other times she’d been here—however at this point the entire left side of the quadrangle was overshadowed by the east tower and curtain wall, so Spike should be able to survive out here fairly comfortably. Which was of the good, because their arrival on the scene had been heralded by an abrupt halt to all activity from the previously-occupied Slayers massed on the quad. The entire population of the castle was out here practicing at sparring and forms, as they ought to be considering a battle was coming. The sight filled her with a kind of quiet pride, but still. All those eyes turned on her and her vampire was irritating enough for her right now, considering she was used to having their attention when it came to calling them to task or giving them a speech… but not with all the questions and the judgment. 

If it was galling for her, though, all that glittering regard from a whole platoon of Slayers had to be unbelievably unnerving for a vampire. His internal Slayer-alarm was probably off the charts right now, with a hundred and four fully-activated girls bristling and glaring at him across only a couple dozen feet of intervening space. It probably beat his sun-warning all hollow. “You okay?” she asked, low and serious.

He already had his cigarette snugged between his lips, Zippo in hand; a sure sign he was fighting for equanimity. “I’ll do.”

He was such a damn trooper when he was on one of his full-on, self-sacrificial ‘support Buffy’ kicks. “Okay.” She caught his eye, solemn and certain. His fingers; the last two, and twitched them with her own. “I love you.” It was a goal, now, to say it as often as possible, and let him know she meant it. Especially back here, in the real world. After the hundreds of times he had given it to her, free and without return, he deserved it, and then some.

A gaze as vividly blue as the sky twinkled back at her, full of mischief. “Love you, Slayer. Go give ‘em hell.” And he slipped his hand away to light up.

/Okay. Showtime./ Turning away, she headed across the courtyard, into the sea of watching, suspicious and curious faces. And hoped that they could do this right. 

They would probably only get one chance to make a first impression.

***

 **S:  
**  
Christ, she was a lioness. He leaned against the wall and watched her as she stalked toward the massed troop of chits, spine straight and hair glowing as she crossed into the sun. Limber as a savanna cat and fierce with it, and bloody hell, she made a man stand up straight and take notice; in more ways than one. He’d be a tent pole by now just watching her if it wasn’t for all the rest, standing about like hovering death. Put a bit of a damper on the libido, even for one such as him who had made a career with flirting with oblivion, and giving himself a stiffy by looking into the face of death. 

It was one thing to seek out the rush by fighting with one Slayer. Two, maybe. A whole other bloody thing to face down a whole buggering castle full of the bints. He liked to dance. Wasn’t on the market to die today, and he damn well knew the bleedin’ difference.

As Buffy stalked to the little knot of slightly tougher-looking birds who, he assumed, comprised the leadership of the place, one of them tossed her the Scythe. It relaxed him a bit just to watch her catch it deftly; to know it was back in her hands. To watch her straighten with it. Swore he could see the power of it pour through her body, heightening the effect of her golden lines, her taut-but-subtle musculature. Clearly it acted as some sort of battery to her demon-side, charging up her Slayer’s nature; or at least that was how he reckoned it, considering how they’d used the thing to grab hold of the Line and wake up the beast in all the other chits as well. 

/Would’ve been bloody useful in hell, that./ Not that Buffy hadn’t been hell on wheels with the axe he’d given her, but she was terrifying with that fucking Scythe. Christ, it was a thing to watch, her using the thing. More than a badge of office, it was a symbol of divine right and a sodding extension of her being; and the confidence it gave her, physical and mental, was a phenomenon to behold. 

As if her hand on the thing had been a universal signal, all eyes in the court left him to turn on her. Which was nice, as it took away half the _frisson_ dancing over his body that had held him rigid, immobile against the stone and fighting with the screaming urge to flee from the heavy presence of so many fucking apex predators all around him, ready to do him in. 

Buffy turned round, away from her little core of leaders. Nodded at the rest. “Alright. We have incoming. Show me what we’ve got to beat ‘em.”

The load of twee Slayers swelled with importance. And went swiftly back to work. 

It was a bit of alright, actually, once he got past the constant hum of terrible danger at the back of his everything. The day was fine—an oddity for this northern hunk of rock—but the blaring warning of ‘SLAYER!’ near drowned out the old, familiar sun-warning, made it right nice to look out on the yellow light from his safe spot in the shade. To watch his love stalk the lines while her girls tussled, one-on-one and one-on-two in organized ranks, doing weapons drills, throws and the like. 

They weren’t Buffy, nor yet Faith. Didn’t have that sense of style, that panache that came from having truly lived it; survived the thing that wanted to swallow them. Wouldn’t, of course. Might never, come to that, since that whole gig was gone. One girl in all the world and all that fucking rot. But… they were coming on well enough for all that. Disciplined, smooth, unharried, and in control of their gifts. Buffy and her chits had them well in hand, for what it was worth.

A clumping noise caught his attention, and Dawn appeared abruptly to plunk down beside him in one of her odd, burlap-looking skirts what looked like they were made of sacking or some such shite, spread her legs out across the cobbles with her great, bare plates thrust out before her. “Crazy, isn’t it?” she asked, looking out over the vista-in-motion.

He snorted. “Like watchin’ a martial arts flick, yeah? Just needs some music for the montage.”

Her large head turned to catch him off guard. “Is it weird for you? You feel them, right? It isn’t like it was with the Potentials.”

He grunted and dropped his fag-end to the stones. Stubbed it out with the toe of his boot. “Yeah. Bloody lot of them. Had heard, of course, but it’s the hell of a thing to feel it. Only caught the edges of it down there in the hellmouth before…” He halted abruptly, not particularly wanting to bring that subject back into focus.

Dawn nodded grimly. “None of them know what it’s really like,” she answered, sounding a little judgmental. “They haven’t even seen what our girls from the house went through.” A faint, dry smile edged her voice then. “They’re okay, but you could wipe the floor with any three of ‘em.”

She was a love, no doubt about it. Loyal as they came. “Think a lot of me, Niblet.”

Her eyes fled to him, solemn and certain. “I’d pick you over any team of the dorks if I needed saving.”

It rocked him. Even after the way he’d failed her… “Christ, Bit…”

She shook her head and looked away again, but he’d seen the wetness round her eyes, smelled the unshed tears. “I haven’t felt really safe for a long time. At least… not when Buffy’s busy. I’m… really glad you’re back, Spike.”

“Me too,” he whispered, because that was really all there was to say, yeah? And, because he’d learned to take the risk with words and not just actions, “I love you, Platelet.”

Her large hand stole down, wrapped around his. Enveloped, held a little too tight. It was a mite damp, but he didn’t mind a whit. “I’ve always loved you, you stupid, crazy vampire.”

“I know.” He managed a shrug. “Never was quite sure why.”

She grinned at him, the mischievous look rising. “Because I feel safe with you, duh.” A bit older, sure, a little wiser, but the expression made her look exactly like the pushy little bint she’d been in high school. “And because you look _really_ good in leather.”

He rolled his eyes. “Stop.”

“It’s okay, Spike. I’ve learned to crush on other people. But, you know… you might have given me a type.” 

She was going to be the death of him. “You stay the bloody hell away from blokes who look like me, Bit, or I’ll strangle you, yeah?”

“Liar,” she answered easily. “You love me too much.”

That supreme confidence in her voice was bridling. How did she always manage to get the bleedin’ best of him? “Drive me barking someday, you will.”

“I try.”

/Christ./ What the bloody hell had he done to get himself saddled with two Summers women? 

Ought to give thanks, he supposed. That was, if Anyone out there would still listen to his worthless arse.

They remained in mutual silence for a long while, just watching the show while Buffy continued her inspection, every inch of her the martial leader. Spike scanned the crowed with her, watching the drilling lines for mistakes, weaknesses. Saw it the same time as she did. The pair there, down near the end of the left line, just there before the shade ended in sun. One of the birds had swept too low with her kick, left herself open. And to make matters worse, the other bird hadn’t even followed up proper. What one wanted to do in such a situation was to come in hard and fast. Swing to the gut. Make the opponent double up like a hedgehog—maybe with a knee if you could manage it—then it was a fist or an axe to the neck… or arms round the head and a pair of fangs to the throat, and off to the races. 

The growl grumbled in him, instinctive enough that Dawn shot him a startled glance, returned her gaze out to the field of battle. “What? What’d I miss?”

“Bloody stupid chits gonna get themselves dead, is all.”

Buffy’s shoulders squared as she stalked toward the sloppy bitches. Even from here, Spike could see that her eyes were blazing; could feel her ire rising in their shared blood. Good on her. /Tell ‘em off right, luv./

He could hear her voice floating across the court as she called a halt to everyone’s practice. All eyes turned on her as she harangued the group and the two offenders in clear, cold tones. He caught the words easily enough. “You left yourself wide open, Colleen. Now you’re dead. And you, Carina; you didn’t follow through. Didn’t see the opening. You miss these moments and you’re all corpses.” She swung her gaze around the wide space, a challenge bright there. “I’ve _been_ dead. I’m here to tell you it’s less than fun. I wouldn’t advise trying it.”

Beside Spike, Dawn tensed. Meet, since he too had gone stiff as a board. “Too bloody right,” he muttered, and struck up another fag. The thought of her lifeless face, her still body laid out on the concrete below the hellbitch’s tower, still haunted his most fearful nightmares, even now that he’d had Buffy back for years. The moment that had broken him clean, forever, from any thought of going back to what he had been. The chip wasn’t in it. _Nothing_ could ever change the sight of her, gone. 

Just, _no_.

“Spike.”

His head jerked up from his malevolent study, and his bleak contemplation fled as he took her in across the court; alive and vibrant… and calling to him. Oh. /Bloody hell./ She wanted a demonstration.

Casting down his newly-lit fag, he pushed away from the wall. Shot Dawn a little smile, hoping it didn’t show, how uncertain he was to be walking into the midst of Slayer-central over there. If it all went to pot, Buffy would get him out. Hell, Dawn would probably wade in too, giant and that, so he supposed he was safe enough. 

Tell that to his instincts though. With every step made toward his heart, his senses shrieked for him to turn and head the other way posthaste. The cacophony of it, as he passed the first rank of staring, stunned slayerettes, had him trembling slightly with an admixture of lip-peeling adrenaline and a colliding, bone-deep allegiance that far surpassed something as simple as devotion. 

The war within ravaged, harrying every step… until he drew close enough to meet her expectant, reassuring eyes. Then it was as nothing. The blaring alarm faded, and he came to her calm and unreachable. This was what Buffy wanted. Whatever Buffy wanted, he would do, and put himself in her hands. He was hers, and she would see to it he was taken care of. That was all of it.

He read gratitude in her gaze, as he drew near, and an acknowledgement of how very difficult this must be for him. A quick flicker of the eyes that asked if he was able. He merely nodded; a quick tilt of the head that said he was ready. Then her gaze was gone from him, leaving him anchorless and bereft as she addressed the suspicious enmity of the tense throng. He held himself still and unbreathing and waited for her to return and engage with him, did not acknowledge the unspoken vituperation of the audience while she spoke. “I want everyone to watch. Spike is going to show you all what happens when you let your guard down, sweep too low. And then I’m going to show you how it goes when you do it right.” Her eyes came back to his, locked on. And he was safe again. “Ready?”

“Yeah.” It was clipped, but not strained. He had her. Crouched a little. /Just us, here./

She tossed aside the Scythe so that some blonde chit caught it, then mirrored his crouch. Gave a little nod, a tiny smile playing at just the corners of her mouth.

/Alright, then./ He lunged. A couple of quick blocks, punches; the smooth dance of it, neither of them gaining the upper hand. Till it was a jarring thing, when she purposefully dropped her guard, kicked too low; and he nearly lost the rhythm of it, nearly missed the chance to do the lesson right. Remembered just at the last moment what he was there to do, and came in with his knee. Caught her in the belly. Doubled her up with a grunt. Wrapped his arms round her head… and tugged her neck in close as he bowed his head. 

Even the smell of his bite on her was not enough, in these environs, to bring him to the place it normally would. Not even her tiny shudder at the feel of him. Not with all these tense Slayers all around him just waiting, itching to take him down and make him dust if they thought he’d actually do a thing to harm their leader. The moment hung, for their unknowing audience, on a dime, the tension in the courtyard a held, violent breath. So. He dropped a light, ceremonious kiss to the side of her beautiful, fragrant neck and stepped back, the most near to unmoved as he had ever been when in contact with her flesh. And when her eyes met his, questioning, could but only shrug slightly and open his hands as if to say, ‘What can I tell you? A bit preoccupied, luv.’

She nodded a hair, expression slightly regretful, and turned to the crowd. “See? You stay open, you swing too low or too high… And it’s over.”

A whole load of exchanged glances from the children as she turned away from them to crouch again. Gave him a nod. 

Well, the bitty Slayers would like this one better, watching him get the take-down. Might salve their aggro a bit. That alone was worth a little blood.

They went through the routine again; no need to think as they moved. The strikes varied, the steps of the dance an easy tango that culminated, as before, in a setup for the kick. But this time she did it right, and swept him so that he lost his stride. Overbalanced, he was knocked back hard by such a punch as only Buffy could deliver. It drove him back arse over teakettle, sent him to the cobbles with a rattling crash that would have maybe knocked a fang loose if he’d been in game face. Not that he would be so stupid, out here among the bints. They could feel him well enough without it, didn’t need the proof of it. 

Christ, but she was a powerhouse, though. He pushed himself up on his palms, grinning a little in spite of himself, and made to shove himself to his feet. “Nice one, luv.” 

Buffy’s hand was there first, though, held out. He caught it automatically, let himself be hauled upright. Not that she wouldn’t have done anyway, but of course best to show the kiddies she thought him deserving of her regard. He was surprised though when he reached up automatically to thumb the trickle of blood away from his nose, and felt her hand there first; pressing. Staunching the sluggish flow with her own warm fingers, then brushing away the bit of ooze. 

He held back from catching her wrist. Probably not entirely politic to clean her fingers in front of the chits, considering the disgust Buffy had shown once when he’d sucked blood off his own in front of her, in her earlier years. Barn door and horses, though, wasn’t it, since she’d already done a bit of throwing intimacy right in their faces? 

“You okay?” she asked, gaze steady on his.

“I’ll do,” he repeated, watching her for his next cue. 

“Thank you,” she told him quietly.

“Of course.” Frank, and sure. /Here to serve, Love. Always./

Buffy turned back to the crowd. “See the difference?” she demanded, eyes glittering on them.

Quiet nods, a few scattered, if subdued “Yes ma’ams”, but the place seemed a bit stunned. 

“Alright. Get back to it. I want to see this tightened up. We can’t afford mistakes when our visitors get here.” Buffy caught up the Scythe from the blonde chit and hefted it, and her eyes turned back to Spike’s, warm and appreciative. “Be done soon.” She let her fingers brush his.

He jerked, surprised at the PDA despite what she’d said upstairs. “Alright.” Turned away, feeling warmed and somewhat overwhelmed as he headed back to the wall. The Slayer-warning didn’t hardly register, all the way back through the clashing ranks, for all they paused as he went by in a ripple of unease and questioning consideration. 

Christ, she could make a man feel ten feet tall, his Slayer, couldn’t she?

***

“And no word anyone else has been attacked yet?”

Some Japanese-looking bird piped up first, from across the refectory table. “None that we’ve heard, ma’am.”

“Then they could all be coming for us.” Buffy poked at her meal, frowning. “Any one of the others, of course, but we’re…”

“The HQ, yeah,” another jumped in. “If they even know that. So far, nothing. You sure these guys are coming?”

Spike hated it when people questioned her. He kept his trap shut about it, but he wanted to get in the chit’s face about it, this Renee. 

“You didn’t hear them,” Buffy told the girl grimly. “They’re definitely coming. Maybe they just needed time to marshal the troops or something.”

Xander looked a little anxious. “Just how many are we talkin’, here? I mean, when you say ‘army’…”

The Renee chit threw Harris an admiring look, as if he’d just put in with the most brilliant thing imaginable. /Well. That the way the wind blows, is it?/

Course, the boy didn’t even seem to notice, troubled eyes focused somewhere in the vicinity of the saltcellars. Whether it be the wrong woman, a demonic lie, or his own emotional issues, the lad had always had a problem seeing what was right in front of his face. Wasn’t the chit his type and all? She wasn’t a blond, being a bit sallow and with black hair, but Harris for certain fancied part-demon sorts. Might be good therapy for him. 

Buffy wasn’t about to let an opportunity pass to get Spike in on the conversation, and interrupted his ruminations to draw him in. “I only saw about thirty, but I think when they attacked our friends in LA, they had more. Did you hear anything different when you were down there, Spike?”

/Oh, bloody hell./ He leaned back, affecting a casual posture he didn’t rightly feel in present company (Buffy aside, of course). “Not exactly one to try to poke into the Scourge’s business. Most of us try to stay clear of them, but yeah. Know they move about a fair bit, and that they show up all over the map, wherever they think there’s an ‘infestation of impurity’ to clean out. Could mean there’s more than one troop of the gits, or that they have some sort of portal they use to gallivant around the globe. Seem to move in squads of about that many, though, near as anyone can figure.”

The tall, willowy, South-Asian-looking bird broke in, her comforting East-London accent belying her words. “What makes you such an expert, anyway, ducks? Know a bit much about these buggers for someone they’re meant to hate, isn’t it?”

He expected the suspicion, so it didn’t faze him. “Yeah, well; got to learn a bit about the ones might hunt you down, you want to avoid ‘em. Still alive, innit? So to speak.”

Turning on the charm helped a little, even with Slayers. He got a few almost-chuckles, at least… and a twinkle of outright amusement from Buffy for the inside joke. They both knew how much he’d learned about another bunch who’d wanted to hunt him down, once upon a time. Made a bit of a hobby of it, point of fact; not that he’d wanted to avoid the Slayers per se. Stood him in good stead in the end, too, hadn’t it, when he’d turned from fighter to lover, knowing all he’d learned of them.

Under the table, a warm leg pressed against his, relaxing him under the fierce stares of her sisters. “Spike’s been my demon liaison and overall consultant regarding things that go bump in the night for years now. You can take what he says as gospel. He won’t tell you what he doesn’t know, won’t hold back on what he does.” A faint smile touched her face. “And if you need to know it, he’ll go get it for you.”

“Cheers, luv.”

“I’ll give him that,” Xander agreed. “One time there was this guy who made everyone sing their deepest, darkest secrets till they danced to death…” He blushed. “It’s a long story. I won’t go into it. But anyway, none of us knew what the heck was going on, and people were burning alive right and left. Spike went out and found one of the guy’s lackeys and brought him in to tell us what was the what before it all went to hell. He was always good at knocking down doors and figuring out the bottom line while the rest of us were still in the middle of a strategy meeting.”

Spike was starting to get unnerved by all these unexpected kudos from the Xander Harris department. Not that he minded, since the boy carried some weight here with the ladies. Would help Buffy to have the backing, and nice to know they weren’t in this alone. Still, and all; it was bizarre, made his hackles rise a bit. 

“Well, based on this intelligence,” the bird with the careful French accent put in, “I expect we will see either a good many come on us all at once, or many coordinated attacks at all our occupied cells. We must keep in good touch with our friends, and communicate swiftly once they arrive.” 

Spike eyed the girl thoughtfully. Not a Gascon, for certain, but there was a tinge of difference at the back of her voice that said… /Oh, she’s a Breton lass./ Interesting. 

“Either way,” the Japanese chit answered staunchly, “we’ll be ready.” 

“That’s the spirit, Satsu,” Buffy agreed, and turned her eyes on the rest of her crew swiftly enough that she entirely missed the way the bird began preening under her general’s praise. Spike raised a brow, watching as Buffy went on. “We’ll be ready because we need to be, however many come.” Her hand slipped unconsciously over, brushed the first two of Spike’s fingers with the last two of her left hand; caught. Held. “Overwhelming odds have never meant much when it comes to Slayers and their friends. Xander and Spike can attest to that. These Scourge bastards won’t know what hit them, as long as we all stick together.”

On the other side of Buffy, Harris nodded firmly. “Damn straight.” Spike, though was absorbed in the way Satsu’s eyes were riveted on their joined hands, a sick look of realization crossing her face. 

/She sick over it ‘cause I’m a vamp and she hero-worships her leader? The whole, ‘the wondrous have fallen from favor’ bit? Or is the chit gone over Buffy?/ 

“I’d hate to say it, and I won’t in front of the trainees, of course,” a Black woman spoke up, her voice thick with the broad vowels of Suffolk, “but I will say I’m a tad concerned if the whole lot of them stop by; especially if, as you say, they’re inclined to bring weapons that can target our sort.” Her eyes jittered about the group, looking uncertain and strained. “Or… what you say are our sort, any rate. A hundred Slayers or a thousand; what does it matter if they incinerate the lot of us, or half, and leave only a few to fight a hundred or more of them?”

Buffy’s fingers tightened on Spike’s. “There’s always a way, Daphne,” she answered, her voice filled with that low, firm resolve that had roused a round dozen terrified Potentials and a bunch of injured, scared humans and part-demons to save the world… and had done, before that, over and over again. “I’ve lived it. I’ve seen it. So have the people who’ve walked it with me. The hellmouth taught us to never say die.” She glanced briefly over at Harris, favoring him with a warm smile, then landed on Spike with a longer, more lingering one. “The Scourge can’t be so bad as Old Ones, a hellgod, or an endless swarm of Turok-Han.”

/Granted, I died doing one of those and you the other… Or, I suppose, you and Rupert, in a way…/ He halted that mental note, because it was too confusing and not at all helpful as a pep talk. /Well, the bastards bring a weapon, I know what it is to _be_ one, so I suppose we’ll come up with something out of our shared experience. Maybe we can throw Harris on it to short-circuit the thing, since he’s the only full-on human in this mess./ The dark, ironic thought amused, but did not comfort. 

Buffy’s eyes were on his, warm and sparking. “Or a huge demon army in the middle of LA.”

He snorted dryly at that, glad she’d named at least one fight everyone had lived through. Well, except for Peaches. And really, it had been a vamp who’d offed him. “Too bloody right. Could have done without the spiders, meself. Nor yet the dragons.”

Harris leaned forward to catch Buffy’s eye with his single remaining, a finger held aloft. “Did you say Old Ones, _plural?_ I only remember the one, myself.”

Spike smirked a bit and crossed his legs at the ankle. “I got myself some Old One action in Hell-A. What can I say? Felt left out that I’d missed the first go-round.”

“Oh.” Fascination reigned. “What was that one like? Another big snake?”

Buffy snorted and shook her head. “No, Illyria could’ve eaten the Mayor for breakfast. She was taller than most skyscrapers and had about fifty tentacles. Fully-armored. But she’s crammed back into a human body now, so it’s all good.” And her leg pressed hard against Spike’s in acknowledgment of the pain that hosting caused him.

Harris gaped. “Just wow. I really do need to hear about what went down while you two were gone, don’t I?”

“It’s the hell of a story,” Spike agreed blandly.

The Londoner bird’s voice broke into this little walk down memory lane. _“You’ve_ helped fight a demon army? And a demon _god?”_ Her voice was incredulous as she stared at Spike.

He affected a casual shrug in return. “It’s where I was needed,” he said simply. “Mostly that’s where Buffy needs me. Only ever sit out a fight if I’m told off to look after Dawn.”

“That’s a whole other battle,” Harris put in, trying to keep a straight face.

Spike could see this little side-conversation was having what he saw now was Buffy’s intended effect. The Slayer chits were all exchanging glances that ranged from shocked to awed to at least slightly less suspicious, any road. 

The only one who remained unmoved was the Satsu bird. She just kept looking at the spot where his hand and Buffy’s met on the table, that nauseous look set on her face like it had been dipped in cement. /Well, hell. Wonder if Buffy knows the chit’s gone on her?/

Could make for some awkwardness down the way.

Buffy shoved her tray away one-handed, looking abruptly irritated. “I just wish we had some intelligence. Knew how they were moving around or something.”

Watching the food slide across the board brought something to mind for Spike. Speaking of looking after the Niblet. “How does little sis get fed, since she can’t fit in here?” He jerked his chin at the afternoon’s offerings.

“Oh. Um, one of our girls usually brings her something after they eat. It’s a rotating detail…”

Spike moved to push himself to his feet. Shot a quick glance at Buffy to be sure she was done with him for the moment; that they’d accomplished what she’d hoped for in this meeting. “If they haven’t done it already, I can bring it to her this time.”

Verdant eyes landed warm on his, threaded with gold, and Christ, he almost couldn’t remember a time when they had been hard and cold. “Thank you, Spike.”

“Of course, Love.” And he was off.

Twenty minutes later he was sitting on the bench in the stable beside Dawn as she supped at a large tureen of the stew using a ladle as a spoon and sipped from a demijohn the kitchen had rigged into a sort of a backpack for the person meant to carry her her drink for every meal (it carried about two liters worth of whatever was to be drunk). “How is it, Platelet?”

“I mean, it’s no pizza with anchovies, but I’ll live.” She favored him with an expansive smile. “Thanks for bringing it out, Spike. Usually by the time someone brings me something it’s kinda cold.”

It irked him. It was like most of the time they half-forgot his Bit existed, out here. “Not sure I like the situation you’re in, Niblet. Sleepin’ in a stable, eatin’ cold food… Not sure what the hell you’re using for a loo since you can’t get in to whatever passes for a bloody WC in this pile, much less how you’re bathing…”

Dawn worked that out slowly. “Oh. I, um…” She blushed. “There’s a big bucket-thing. Behind that curtain. And some sawdust. They call it a ‘composting toilet’. When it gets full I carry it out to this sort of compost pile out back. It’s kind of gross, but like you said, I can’t fit inside, so…” She shrugged it off. “And when I need a bath, there’s the lake. That’s what I was doing when you two came home. I usually wait till it’s dark, you know? It’s kind of embarrassing, even though most of the people here are girls; and the sky stays so light here this time of year…”

“Oh, Christ, Bit, I’m sorry.” She must be so bloody uncomfortable.

She looked away, avoiding his eyes. “It’s my own fault,” she mumbled.

“No, damn it. You listen to me, Dawn. It isn’t. No one has any right to curse you with somethin’ like this, no matter what happened; you hear me?” The chit was living in literal sackcloth, for chrissake. “We need to fix this, alright? We’re going to find a way to put it right just as soon as this Scourge business is done. But we can’t do it if you don’t tell us how it happened…”

She wouldn’t meet his eye. “I can’t.”

Her miserable tones caught at the heartstrings… but they also grated. He fought hard not to press too fast or to sigh for the vagaries of teenage dramatics. “I’m not going to judge you, Niblet.”

She just shook her head, and he could see a large tear glistening in the corner of one eye even from here.

“Well, if you can’t tell me, tell Buffy. Christ knows she wants to help.”

It burst out of her, an incredulous note, heightened by strain. “Oh, God; I definitely can’t tell _Buffy!”_

/Bleedin’ hell./ He sought for patience, for kindness. “Why not, Bit?” he managed gently. 

“B…because… of what happened with her and Angel.”

Alright, that cut it. “Dawn, did that little pissant hurt you?”

Her head jerked around, her mouth rounded in an ‘O’ of shock at his sudden, frothing rage. She could read him well enough to know he was only narrowly holding it in check. “Oh. No, Spike! I mean…” She blushed. “No. Not like that. It’s just...” She shook her head and looked away again, at her hands. “After what happened to her, I don’t think she needs to hear about what happened, you know, for me. It’ll be like… a bad echo or something. Or she’ll get mad that I repeated her mistakes, or something…”

He did sigh this time, and flung himself down onto the chilly stone floor. Flopped an arm over his propped up knee and shoved a hand through his hair. “For chrissake, Dawn, your sister’s a big girl now, innit? And I can tell you for sure she’s put her past to rest when it comes to all that. She wants to be there for you; and honestly, it can help, to use your experience to walk someone through their own. Like bloody therapy. Tell you that for sure, since it did the trick for me; more’n once.”

That got her attention. “What… happened to you?”

/Oh hell./ “I’ve lived a bloody long life,” he evaded. “Easier to ask what _hasn’t_ happened to me, Platelet. But we’re not talkin’ about me, so stop deflecting.” And when she avoided his gaze, “Just think about it, yeah? You’re gonna have to tell one of us, or someone, sometime, if you’re ever gonna get out of this; or soon you’re gonna be taller than the bloody castle. Bet that’ll be a mite uncomfortable, come winter.”

Dawn shrank into herself, looking defeated. He felt bad to put it to her that way, but the Bit was stuck between a rock and a hard place right now, and best if she faced it and got on with the situation. “We’re ready to listen whenever you’re ready to talk…”

“They’re here!” The shriek penetrated Spike’s ears, brought him to his feet to bolt out of the stable. He stared up toward the tower where the chits had a lookout posted, saw the distant figure gesticulating into the lengthening shadows. “Coming up from the southeast! Dozens of ‘em!” The lookout fell silent for a second, then, “Shite, they’re _ugly!”_

The courtyard was already boiling with darting Slayers as Dawn exited to stand beside him. She shivered a little, looked up at the still-light sky. “Somehow I thought we’d be good till it got dark. I don’t know why I thought that. It’s not like every major baddie we’ve ever seen waited till nighttime to come after us.”

“Maybe they just wanted enough shade to cover their movements,” Spike answered grimly. “Or maybe they don’t care much about being seen by humans for this one.” Turning on his heel, he shot the Bit a sharp look. “Keep your head down, yeah?”

“Okay. Be careful, please?”

He couldn’t handle the plaintive note in that young voice, begging him not to leave her again. “I’ll do my best, Niblet.” And he strode off back toward command central. 

The place was a kicked anthill when he arrived. He zeroed in on Buffy, of course, and planted himself at her back, just to her left, where he belonged. It was no longer a time when he’d brook argument as to whether he got to be there. This was full battle readiness. 

She was already snapping orders, interrogating the lookouts and the rest, every inch the competent commander, though she did seem to relax just a hair when she felt him arrive. “You say they’re massing here, between us and the lake?”

“Yes, General. Staying under the trees.”

“And trying to cut us off from the water, in case we don’t have a well or a full pantry.” Her eyes flickered briefly to Spike’s. “It’s a good tactic. This many people won’t last long without water.” 

/Hell-A was a damn good primer on that one./

“Good thing we’re all stocked up, then,” Xander pointed out grimly. 

“Yeah. Nadira are the walls manned?” 

“Womaned to the teeth,” Londoner bird replied, showing all hers in a fierce grimace.

Buffy’s smile turned a little feral. “Good. And we’ve notified the other cells?”

“Aye,” the blond chit, Rowena, answered briskly, fingers dancing over a keyboard off to one side. “No one else has seen any action as yet.” 

“Then we’ve probably got all of ‘em.” The set of Buffy’s face, her body, turned grim and determined. Spike knew that look. He wouldn’t want to be those Scourge tossers right now. “We’ll take the assaults in shifts. Keep our people in good shape in case this drags out.” Her body brushed Spike’s, a reminder. “Ongoing assaults really take it out of you if you don’t get enough rest.”

He hoped the chits sodding knew they were getting the voice of experience here. /And speaking of, pet, you’ve had all of three hours today./

He knew she was aware of his concern on that matter by the way she jerked her head a little to dismiss the new tension in his frame. “I’ll take first shift with Nadira and Privela. Satsu, Daphne, Tifenn and Xander can take the second with their squads…”

/And you’ll get some bloody sleep while they do, if I have to knock you over the damn head./

“Buffy,” Xander broke in, “not to argue, but what if we’re not exactly able to sleep with a battle going down, so we’d rather pitch in?”

Buffy turned on him. “Then you get a quick look and you try again. I need you on the second watch, Xander, to help them make sense of it. Or _I_ won’t sleep.”

It was a measure of her confidence in him as right-hand-man that she was giving him her spot when it came to oversight. He should take it for the accolade that it was. 

It seemed he had. “Alright, Buff. Will do.”

“Okay.” She surveyed the room. “Everyone clear on their orders?”

“Yes ma’am.” 

“Then get situated.”

Very shortly they were left alone, save for a few blinking screens and an irritating electronic hum. Still brandishing the Scythe in the right, Buffy’s left hand slipped back, caught his. “You ready?”

“As ever, Love.”

She turned to face him, eyes slightly troubled. “I’d ask you to do the second shift, but…” 

She was lovely. “They wouldn’t follow me. And you know I’m not leaving you.” He brushed her cheek and shook his head at her for being daft. “You think it’s even in question?”

“No,” she answered quietly. “Just want you to know I know you could do it better than anyone.” 

“Appreciate it, pet.” He jerked his head away toward the door, gave her hand a tug… and kept it tilted in invitation. “Ready to go topside and get the lay of the land?”

“We’re gonna win this one too, Spike,” she told him softly. “And then no one’s going to tell us who we get to be, ever again.”

She was bloody courageous. And a firebrand. And he loved her like life. “I believe you, Buffy.”

***

The sodding bastards were all round them. At the gates. At the walls. Crowded round the midden where Dawn disposed of her night-basket. Taking up space about the pond. Just generally making a nuisance of themselves. 

They didn’t appear to have brought any great magickal bleedin’ weapon with them this time, though, whatever Angel had seen his last go-round with the prats. In fact, Spike wasn’t entirely sure what their assault plan was. So far it seemed to be just a load of standing about, showing their teeth and looking like a bad case of road rash after an SS drinking party. Maybe they thought they looked intimidating. Maybe that was part one of their battle plan. Sodding waste of time, to his mind. “Oi! You lot gonna do anything besides smell up the place?” he shouted over his shoulder through an embrasure.

Buffy dragged him back into their strategically-safe pocket of shade, hissing at him to shut up. But, for chrissakes, he was getting bored. It had been three _hours_. The day was getting on for evening and nothing had bloody happened yet. “Talk about a bleedin’ anticlimax.”

“The less time we spend actually fighting, the less people die, you idiot,” she told him grimly, and laid her head back against the shaded stone. Closed her eyes, because whether or not she wanted to admit it, without the constant pumping of adrenaline to keep her going, she was getting tired. 

She looked right peaceful, propped there in the sunless corner between the tower and the first embrasure. He could let her slip into a catnap while nothing at all was happening; keep a lookout. Might be for the best. Sod all going on any road. He leaned over to get another look past the battlement… and was brought back to regard her by a light touch on his hand. “Keep me awake, Spike. Talk to me.”

“Could sleep, luv. Nothing doing right now.”

She sighed. “It would be bad for morale.”

He rolled his eyes. For one thing, the closest chit was two embrasures away and sitting tensely, scarcely taking note as she peered through her own opening at the invaders. Probably she was avoiding looking at Buffy apurpose if it meant she could also avoid acknowledging the existence of their unwonted resident vamp. And for another, as if every third soldier in every battle since time began hadn’t seized the moment when the front was quiet to snooze a bit. But he supposed the leaders all held themselves to a higher standard and that. 

Problem was, he wasn’t sure what the bloody hell to say. “I think there might be hope for Harris yet,” he opened finally. It was as good a subject as any. “The Scots chit, Renee? She’s madly in love with him.” For lack of anything better to do, he pulled out a fag and lit up. “Must be one of those types as fancies the broody, broken sorts.”

Buffy’s tired eyes popped open, and she stared down into the shadow-darkened training grounds, a pensive little frown playing about her lips. “I _thought_ there was something. Oh, God, she’s going to get her heart broken. Xander’s so not in a place to deal with some girl’s crushy feelings.”

“Yeah, well. Their problem.” He leaned his head back, eyes closed so that the light from the lowering sun out there beyond the west wall, just where it could not touch him, beat against his eyelids. It was orange, from inside; like Hell-A, where they had spent their bit of honeymoon together. Little war, a little peace, a little shacking up. Their light, their time. Grinning a little, he took in a blissful drag… and opened them to turn an interested eye on his mate. “Not the only one brewin’ in this bitty soap opera, either. The chit Satsu’s got it bad for you, you know.” He made sure to put it as if he were talking about something as bland as what they might eat for supper… and waited.

Sure as balls, she jerked around to stare at him in complete shock. “What?”

/Christ, Buffy, you’re oblivious./ “The lesbian bird,” he answered, and couldn’t stop the tiny smirk that touched his lips at her stunned expression. “She’s mad for you. Can see it a mile off.”

“Wh… How… No, that can’t…”

He snorted derisively at her stunned protestations. “Know a bit about it, yeah? What it’s like to be gone over you. Know the signs. The bird is daft over you, pet.”

Now well and truly awake, Buffy shook her head in thoroughgoing denial. “This isn’t another one of your wild theories like the whole ‘Faith’s always been into Buffy’ thing, right, because we all know you’re just messing with me with that one…”

“No, that one’s right on the money too, Love.” He kept the smirk as he pulled in another drag, then rolled his tongue behind his teeth and eyed her with interest while he let the smoke pool and percolate in his lungs. Allowed it to waft slowly through his system, curl finally out through his nostrils before he spoke, enjoying as he did her show of disbelief and scorn, all tinged with edges of discomfort. “We can’t help it, is the thing. All the tough ones fall the minute we look at you. I think it’s the deceptive combination of your girlish figure in those cute halter tops, that pert tongue of yours… and then, _bam_.” He let the smirk bloom. “You hit us right in the face with your deadly right hook, and it’s all over.”

It was her turn to roll her eyes at him. “I haven’t been cute in a long time, Spike. I’ve been too busy.”

He resisted the urge to pull her into his lap, where he could snug that lovely arse over his prick. “Beg to differ, pet. You’re still bloody adorable. You just hide it well.” 

“You’re deranged. I think you’ve watched too many soap operas…”

She wasn’t going to shake his smug expression. Finally she sighed. “C’mon. Stop telling me fairy tales about your super-biased idea of my attractiveness, and let’s focus on this war.”

“I’m bein’ objective as hell, but alright.” Turning around to squat behind the wall, he kept up a mutter to entertain her. Had her awake by now anyway, so mission accomplished, he supposed. “Bloody fairy tales. Lay you a wager right now the chit’s going to make a pass at you sometime within the next month. Easy.”

“How much?” Buffy shot back, sounding intrigued in spite of herself. 

He felt fair confident in his read. Problem being, would Buffy even recognize it if the bird flirted with her? Judging by history… “Tell you what. Next time you talk to Red, ask her what she thinks about the Faith business. If she thinks I’m wrong there, you win already. If not, it’ll give you something to go by…”

That earned him a hard look. “You think I wouldn’t even know it if…” An irate note entered his Slayer’s voice. “Spike, I can tell when someone’s flirting with me!”

“Were real good at it when I did it, all those years.”

That took her aback. “Well, it doesn’t count when your flirting tactics include discussions on how to dismember me!”

“Point.” Still, he happened to think she’d been awfully thick about it. /Though, to be fair, so were you, me lad, when it came to your own motivations. And you were bloody thick as a post when she was sending you signals like a semaphore last year, so there’s that again./ “Still, those are my stipulations, yeah? Then, once you’re payin’ the proper attention,” he went on briskly, “I’d say…” He dropped his voice to a low, throaty register. “I win, you spend a week showin’ me just how much you love cock. I lose, I spend the same week showin’ you I’m better than any lesbian you might ever wish to dally with, no strings.”

He felt her shiver from there. It coiled in their shared blood. And when she answered, her voice sounded a mite hoarse. “That sounds… like a nice little bet.”

“Done, then.”

The gray-uniformed monsters roiled beyond the walls, waiting for Christ knew what. Some bastard among them was giving some sort of orders, but it was clear they were waiting for cover of darkness to carry them out. At least something of interest was happening, though, finally, since the buggers were finally arraying themselves into something that looked like ranks, all round the eastward side of the castle; from causeway to sally-port and back again. There looked to be a good hundred and fifty of the gits, all the unfortunate victims of their heritage and all probably the hell of a lot prettier once the sun went down. They made the bloke from _Texas Chainsaw Massacre_ look a right catch. 

He’d never had occasion to see them up close. Had never hoped to. God knew most vamps went out of their way to avoid the bastards. But when you ended up white-hatting, this was the sort of thing that happened. You landed in battles with the creatures you had nightmares about as a bitty fledge, risking your bloody existence to protect others who would normally hunt you down and dust you soon as look at you. 

The world was a bloody strange place of late. /The things we do for love and all that rot./

Showtime any minute now. The keyed-up sense of readiness took him as he smelled dusk coming on. He pulled himself up taut, feeling Buffy do the same beside him as the sun rolled under the horizon, in a pink-and-orange blaze of glory. Bloody gorgeous, from this not so deadly vantage. Gorgeous, and deadly. 

Because of course, once it was gone, they got to see what the Scourge had brought for them. And it was lethal. 

They had come loaded for Slayers. Because why bother bringing magickal bits and bobs or great, questionable spells and outdated weaponry to the party when you could just bank on their being mostly human, and spray them with bullets?

***  
  
  
  
  
dun dun duuuunnnnnn...


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...   
> Please don't hate me for what I do right off the top in here. I fix it.
> 
> Also... I do a probably polarizing thing in here, and I'll stand by it. And, I straighten out a preconception and an incorrect bit of word-usage from the show which has been a pet-peeve of mine for years, because I'm Pagan and was Wiccan for a long time, and some things are liable to drive me around the bend if I don't have my say eventually.

**B:  
  
**

“Goddammit, Spike, what the _hell_ were you thinking?” Buffy muttered it, a fierce, terrified imprecation as she tore at his sodden shirt. They were huddled inside the tower, the rest of the Slayers also cowering wherever they could find cover, because who would have thought some ancient sect of pureblood demons would have brought silencer-clad machine-guns to an assault like this?

Spike laughed; a sick, gurgly sound, and a red bubble popped in his mouth. “Not… playing the game… by the bloody… rules. Wankers.” More blood was coming up, trailing out of the corners of his lips; a hideous parody of feeding. The wrong death.

It was too much like Angel; but here, with no time-loop to turn it back. It threw Buffy into a panic. “No, no, no…” She had to get his shirt open, had to find out where the bullets had…

A pale hand caught her wrist, hard and strong and cold as ice. “Gonna live, Buffy.” Another horrifying bubble popped in his mouth, but he already seemed to be gurgling a little less. “Not wood.” He coughed, eyes strangely intense on her in the near-total dark. “Got you?”

She closed her eyes, the shaking making her weak. “No, you took them all, you madman.” Seven. Seven huge holes, arrayed across his abdomen, on a diagonal from under his left nipple down to his right hip. They wrote a terrible, gaping story across the beautiful terrain of his pale flesh, and her fingers trailed there, across the godawful, oozing tracks of dark, used blood. Smearing them, as if she could somehow push it back in…

“Too right.” He stirred, and one wet, crimson hand rose, hovered near her face, though he didn’t touch. “Heard… what happened. When Glinda…” The hand dropped. “Red’s not here. No way in hell…”

She caught the hand in her own bloody one; held it close to her cheek, clasped between both of hers. Tried to keep her eyes on his, and not on those godawful holes that stubbornly refused to close. “You’re not healing fast enough.”

“Slow going. Tore into me… proper. Manage eventually.” 

She tried not to quake with the terror of it as she kissed the hand. The taste of blood on her lips was sweet, terrifying quicksilver. “It sounds idiotic to say this, but we don’t have anything here that can fight guys with guns.” Luckily right now the bastards seemed to be happy with the success of their first salvo, and were just standing around down there congratulating themselves while they waited to see if there would be any answer from up top. Which there wouldn’t be. Not yet. Not till the embattled Slayers figured out what to do. /Keep the cage across the gate. Keep everything locked down. Don’t use people to hold them off. Keep targets off the walls…/

“Think they can… beat you lot… holding their… pricks in their hands… ‘Nother think coming…” Despite his pale features, his clear anemia, Spike glowed with confidence in their abilities.

“Like you said, we don’t have Willow.” /God, Wil, why aren’t you _here?_ / Buffy had to fight to keep her hands from the wounds. From trying to close them by sheer force of will, using her own palms, her strength, her love. “I’m not sure what we’re going to do to shield us from this attack. They’re just going to keep spraying us with bullets to keep our heads down and then come swinging through the gates.” 

“Think of something. Harris. Got the memories…”

He did. It was a good point. “Haven’t you been through wars?” She knew her voice sounded shaky.

Spike tried a derisive snort, though it mostly came out as a weak-sounding exhale. Blood came with it, trickling from his nose. /Oh God./

“Wasn’t exactly… fighting then. Easy pickings, wartime.”

/Well, you asked./ “I’m going to get you to bed, and then I think we need another council.” She moved to heft him to his feet, dragging one too-cold arm over her shoulder. He grunted, wincing, but at least fresh oozing didn’t commence from the horrifying decoupage of holes sprayed across his abdomen. And maybe they were smaller? “You’d think, with that type-O from the jet, and the stuff from Wolfram and Hart the other day—God, that’s weird to say—that you’d be healing faster.” /Not to mention I’ve fed you, what? Twice, right? It _was_ twice, wasn’t it? You didn’t take much either time because you weren’t really hungry, but it’s Slayer blood, so…/

“Didn’t get… through me to… get you. Takes longer when…” He stumbled on the first step of the stone spiral, nearly taking them both down. “…They’re still inside.”

“The bullets?” /Oh, man./ “What, they’re just rattling around in you?” He didn’t need all his organs anymore, so what? Since the stupid little jags of metal couldn’t do their jobs, they were just in there knocking around keeping him bleeding and making a mess of things?

Spike was clearly concentrating on his footwork, for he didn’t answer for a moment. Finally, though, “Some point… my body’ll… cocoon ‘em,” he grunted, placing his feet with care. “‘Ventually push ‘em out. Hurt… like a bitch.” He stopped to lean against the wall, gasping; not because he lacked oxygen from the blood loss, but because of the pain. “I ever… mention to you… pet, that I… sodding hate getting shot?”

She tried not to wince. “How often have you been shot?”

“Few times.” He groaned a little and shoved himself away from the wall with his shoulder, teeth locked in determination. “Usually… not this many… at fucking once.”

He was leaning very hard on her. It seriously worried her. How much blood had he actually lost?

Probably a lot, since she knew based on what they’d left up there on the battlements was more than she’d seen on the dock when that secretary guy had died, when Faith had accidentally staked him. Enough, by far, to have killed a human, then. 

Which would mean he would need to feed, to replace what he had lost. Which also meant that he was lying to her, at least a little, about why it was taking him so long to heal. Because the sun wasn’t up. It was nighttime, and he’d fed very recently, so there was no other reason he shouldn’t be doing better. 

/He just doesn’t want to weaken you in the middle of a fight./

God, he was a jerk. /It isn’t like you’d have to drain me, you idiot. Slayer blood, remember? And I’m all, super-potent gal? Back in my own dimension, even./ She could feel the difference, here, now that they were in a battle and her adrenaline was up. The proof of it was roaring through her. Demon-y parts wide-awake and screaming at her to fight, to rip off heads, to attack, to possess. She could handle this; she could handle anything. She could take care of him and have plenty left for the fight, and they both knew it. Stupid martyr-y vampire.

Seriously, sometimes he was the living end. 

Their room was, luckily, relatively close to this end of the wall. She got him out of the tower and down the short length of hall, and was able to see as they passed through that lighted space that his eyes were red-rimmed, his face terrifyingly drawn and pale. /Just, no./ Dragged him through the door. Shoved him down on the bed… and yanked her shirt off with a curse. It was covered in blood anyway. Pulled him up against her while he blinked at her in confusion. “Don’t fight with me.” And dragged his head down over her shoulder till his face was hard up against her neck.

“No.” His countenance remained stubbornly unchanged against her skin, his bloodied hands limp on the bed and refusing to grip her. And dammit, he was way too cold.

Her flesh prickled, coming awake and aware of him. His muffled voice, his chilly breath against the scar of his bite, juddered through her, her blood coming awake to his need. It raged through her, bringing the surge of it to the surface; to the place where his mouth hovered, determinedly closed. “I said don’t fight with me.”

“Buffy, I’ve had…”

“I don’t care. You’ve lost it all. I’ll go down and have something to eat myself, after. If you don’t, I’ll…” There was really no threat she could make right now that wouldn’t come off as ridiculous, and they both knew it. She closed her eyes, her breath hitching. “Don’t make me beg, dammit.”

His cold hands came up to her waist, to leave two moist, red handprints just below her ribs. He tried to put her gently away from him, but he was shockingly weak right now, and she held on easily. Held him in place. “Buffy…”

“I can’t lose you and you know it. And you know it’ll work better here. Faster. I’m in my own damn dimension; more demon, less human. I’ll heal faster, _you’ll_ heal faster…” 

Something was trembling in him. Raging hunger, warring with his insistent credo to keep her safe and whole. But fear of loss drove her; to do the same. To join with him in any and every way to negate the near loss. “Spike!”

“Fuck,” he whispered… and broke. Vamped. His fingers dug hard into her sides… and such was her terror of losing him that the very fierceness of this feral grip brought her body into a thrumming readiness, brought her awareness sharply into focus as his breath snuffled against her bite and he nuzzled, sending sharp, needy jolts through her. And then he was breathing her in, open-mouthed and groan-growling, fingers pumping, pulling her closer, ever closer to him in sharp, almost-painful jerks that felt like sex, felt like desperation; felt like life. /Go on/ she thought, and clenched her hand hard in his hair.

He made a keening sort of sound, like he was dying, and his fangs sliced cleanly through. 

Like fire; but a sharp, lancing fire. And then he was pulling; and she had wondered. Wondered what it would be like, with him, without sex. She’d thought they might get there, someday; in battle or in need. Remembered, when she’d wondered, how it had been with Angel; the agony of it, the ferocious, gnawing, ravaging viciousness of it as he’d drained her of life. But even in this; in the extremity of his need, Spike was careful, considerate. He fought for control, and to keep her foremost in his mind. And he was right. With the pathways of the bite laid bare to her body, the pulling feeling of his feed brought the surging from throat to nipples to clit; sent sparks through her, all the way down. And it was wonderful, in its own way, to be able to feel it separately, as its own thing, and to know it without the rest. To know what part of it was from the bite and what part of it he brought most other times with his miraculous hands, and his humming, vital sensuality. 

She felt the slight lightheadedness; the one that would have signaled orgasm at any other time, should they be doing this the other way. And he stopped abruptly, shuddering against her, while parts south in her body shuddered with him, confused and uncertain why they hadn’t gotten their normal treatment during the festivities. Which was… Well. He would be alright. And she would go find something to kill. 

His roughened tongue slid over the bite to close it, making her jerk, and her right hand fell from his neck to his shoulder to clamp down hard. “Hardly seems fair,” he whispered to her throat, voice a little hoarse, “to leave you like that, and not even see to you as a thank you.”

“I don’t think we have time,” she answered as hoarsely; though dammit, she really wished there was. /I have a war to fight./ She pulled away and shoved briskly at his shoulders, and ha! His stupid wounds were already pebbling over. “You’re such a damn liar.”

He had the grace to look embarrassed. “Meant what I said. I’d heal eventually…” 

Her fingers fell to his blood-smeared abdomen. She ran them down along raw-but-healed tissues, heard him hiss at the tenderness, but… God; he was safe now. Yet… she wanted to make sure of it; so badly. Wanted to push him down and inspect every inch of his skin with her lips. To palpate with caressing fingers, with her tongue, with kisses, for the bullets inside; to ensure they’d stopped moving, been immobilized somehow, cocooned in safe little sacs of tissue till he could pass them. Wanted desperately to take care of him in every possible way, beyond the swift first aid of the moment. To care for him as a mate should, and convince her mind, her lizard brain, that he was whole, in one piece, still with her…

She made a face at him and shoved away off the bed, if only to get some distance; because touching him right now was a surefire way to forget there were demons out there with guns, of all things, and that there were no doubt casualties, and that they were under siege, and that this was a fucking triage and nothing more. And, just, dammit. “Change your stupid shirt and c’mon.”

Apparently unaffected by her clipped tones, he rolled to his feet and bent over to pop open the suitcase he’d never bothered to empty, pulled out another identical tee. “Some point I’m going to need to clean up,” he commented easily… but the regret remained in his voice. 

/Well, damn./ “You and me both.” She dug haphazardly in the freestanding closet, seeking in the dark for a not-bloody blouse, uncaring of which. Yanked on the first one that came to hand, sexual frustration lending to hard, jerky movements. “You know, this war sucks!”

He eyed her with wry amusement. “Nothing to swing at, is it?”

“I might just go out there and punch all of them in their gross, ugly faces.” 

He was up in an instant, had caught her arm in a fast grip. “Hit _me_ , Buffy. Or we’ll have a fast shag now; but don’t be stupid.” 

She sighed and shook off his arm. “I’ll live. But I’m going to screw your brains out ASAP.” Her stomach rumbled. “After I eat,” she amended ruefully.

“Gotta love a woman who knows her priorities.”

***

Sounds of chaos and distress echoed through the castle corridors as they made their way down to the main floor. Buffy made a swift, necessary detour through the kitchen to grab some juice and a muffin and worked on them en route to the command room, the noise becoming louder and more concentrated as they drew closer. Spike, it must be noted, watched approvingly as she wolfed the thing down and chased it with high-sugar fluids, though he muttered as they approached about protein. 

When they rounded the last corner to the command center doorway, the dim hallway touched by the light spilling out of the room, it outlined Xander’s anxious form. He stood directly in the opening, hands braced on the jamb, limned in the blue glow and blocking the uproar. He caught sight of them almost as soon as they saw him; shouted her name and bolted from the arched opening to close with them, almost babbling in relief. “Thank God! We were sure you were dead! Callista was up there, saw all the blood…” Before either of them could explain his hand reached out, not quite touching Buffy’s face. “Oh, man, _Buffy_ …”

/Oh, right./ She’d forgotten she had dried blood basically all over her. “It’s not mine. Spike took about seven bullets for me.”

Xander actually slumped in relief. And then he surprised them both when he turned to Spike and caught him so abruptly by the hand that Spike damn near reared back. Covered his hand with the other and pumped it, hard, firm, and sincere. “Seriously, man, thank you. I thought…” His voice was hoarse. “God, after the last time, when Warren… All I could think about was watching her, laying there, and all that blood… And we don’t have Wil here to bring her back, and… Just, thanks, Spike.” 

Spike seemed wholly nonplussed. Understandably so, of course, considering this was _Xander_. “Uh, of course, mate. I mean, it’s _Buffy_.”

Xander let go of the hand and nodded a little nervously as he shoved his own, for lack of anything better, into his pockets. “I mean, yeah. Of course. It’s Buffy...” He winced. “Still, that must have hurt like hell. I mean… are _you_ okay?”

He really was trying hard to be nice to Spike. It was super clear to everyone concerned. Best, then, to keep things at station-keeping for the moment, Buffy supposed. In the face of all this unexpected goodwill she found herself oddly loathe to upset the apple-cart, despite her slightly perverse wish to just wave her freak-flag in everyone’s faces and insist that she was in no way ashamed of what she and Spike had. Just get it over with and not have it hanging over their heads anymore.

She could feel Spike’s amusement rise, strangely without expectation. Heard the small, dry note in his reply for the unspoken reason that he _was_ okay. “I’ll do,” he answered laconically. 

The tone inspired Buffy to have to stuff down a completely inappropriate urge to burst into giggles. She fought them down to qualify, “Well, except that he’s still full of bullets rolling around inside of him...” 

“Oh, _man_ …”

“They’ll push out.” Spike was still being Mr. Man of Few Words. “I’ll get on alright.”

“I’m glad.” Xander even sounded like he meant it.

“Is…” Buffy began, and almost choked on it. Steeled herself. “Who didn’t make it?”

Xander shuddered visibly in the gloom. “Clarissa. Paulette. Rhonda. Claudia is in the infirmary. She probably won’t pull through. We haven’t found Theresa. There are a lot of minor injuries…”

/Oh God./

“Dawn?” Spike asked, his voice taut and harsh with worry.

“I just came back from checking on her. She’s scared, but okay. We’ll let her know we found you so she won’t freak anymore.” 

Spike relaxed beside Buffy, mirroring her response. But before she could ask another question, Xander was staring at her again, his one eye full of concern. “Buffy, are you sure you’re alright? You’re a little pale, and there was so much damn blood up there at your position…”

“I’m fine,” she hastened to reassure her oldest friend with a smile. “Seriously.” And was startled when he slammed into her abruptly, wrapping her up in a fierce Xander Harris hug. 

“God, you had me scared half to death. I was about to go out searching for you myself, and to hell with holding this place together…” His voice, murmuring into her shoulder, was muffled and indistinct… and to her discomfort, his cheek and chin were pressed right up against Spike’s newly-renewed bite. Which, for the record, was just weird input. Her body wanted to shudder against the pressure, but the form pressed against her was the wrong temperature, and smelled and felt all wrong, because Xander registered to her more as a sibling, almost, than anything else. Comfort-safe-Xander-smell, but not… 

Spike felt it, of course, and his body was tight with awareness though his expression as her eyes jerked briefly to his was resigned. 

She returned the embrace, patting Xander’s shoulder and feeling unaccountably awkward. “I’m fine, Xan. I promise.”

“Did I hurt you? You get some bruised ribs or something?” Xander pulled back, sounding concerned, held her away from himself to study her. “Didn’t mean to squeeze too hard.” 

“What?” She was totally thrown, now.

“You just flinched a little.” He gave one of his little patented, self-denigrating Xander-shrugs. “I know on a normal day the Xan-man couldn’t hurt you if I tried, but if you…” Then he tensed abruptly, his face going exceptionally blank. And he reached out to push at the collar of her shirt where it had slipped to the side during their hug.

/Oh. Well, damn. There’s _that_ subject wide open./

Buffy braced for impact, feeling Spike tense up beside her. 

“Oh no. Oh God…”

She knew where this was going. Knew that sick tone, and she was so not going to do this. Not right now. Not at all. “This is none of your business, Xander.” Flat, firm. Brooking no nonsense. 

His eye, his expression, had turned nauseous. “Are you _kidding_ me?” he demanded, and lifted his burning gaze to meet hers. Slid it over, accusing, to Spike’s.

Spike drew himself up still and did not flinch. “B’lieve Buffy said it’s none of your business, Harris. Might be best to respect the Slayer’s wishes, yeah?”

All goodwill had evaporated on that front. All willingness to communicate at all, it seemed, for Xander did not trust himself to respond even so much as to throw a barb. He merely tore his eye away to drill it instead back at Buffy, horrified. “Buffy, are you _serious?_ Once wasn’t _enough_ for you?”

The fact that he would pull the Angel card now, so many years later, was just dirty pool. Buffy debated punching him, but it really didn’t solve any problems. “For the record, Xander, this isn’t the first time. It won’t be the last. And, I repeat, it’s none of your business.” /Not gonna do this with you./ She shook her head; a sharp, negating jerk. “We have a council to get to.” She started past him, for the door.

In a perfect world, that should have been the end of it. But of course, it was Xander, so it wasn’t. He grabbed at her arm—which, _really?_ —stumbling on the revelation. Spike let out a low growl at his temerity, but he seemed not to notice. His expression bled shock, his one eye bulging. “It’s not… You mean you… _let_ him…” His eye darted from Spike to Buffy and back again, a sick slide of realization and horror. 

Buffy sighed, shaking off his hand, and dropped her own back to fold her fingers in Spike’s. “Tell me there weren’t things you did for and with Anya, to honor her past, her history, her beliefs, that ended up becoming special to you, too.” It would hurt him to bring her up, but the comparison needed to be made.

Xander reeled back from her, his disgusted expression turning to betrayal-anguish. “That’s… That isn’t… That’s _not_ the same!”

/Tell me how it’s not, dammit!/ “For Spike’s demon, this is a promise. We’ve made other ones, with words, and without them. But this one… This one is special. I needed him to know I’ve always loved him. That I _still_ love him; soul or no soul.”

The fingers caught in hers bore down hard as Xander quailed, looking as if he needed to sit down. “But, the…” He swiftly changed tacks at her hard expression. “And… you were so _miffed_ at Riley for…”

/Yeah, well…/ “I was younger and more judgmental then. And as I recall, you were there cheering me on to take him back, even though he was doing it behind my back.” She let her hard voice drop to an even fiercer register. “So tell me Xander, how is it so much different, so much more okay, what he was doing, that I should’ve forgiven him, and it’s so much less okay and so unforgivable what I’m doing now, with a loving partner, when this way it’s a totally consensual give-and-take?”

Spike made a sound that was somewhere between derisive and triumphant, clearly awaiting Xander’s response to that.

Xander’s answer was to gape at her as if she had gone insane. “What the heck could you _possibly_ be getting out of this,” he demanded harshly, “besides a woozy head right before a fight, and a chance to risk your life all the damn time?”

Spike fielded that one before Buffy could jump back in. “You _are_ thick, Harris. You never wondered why Soldier-Boy kept goin’ back to the suckhouses, did you? Or exactly why Buffy felt so bleedin’ brassed off about it?” Xander flinched visibly at that. “And for the record, I never take enough to leave the Slayer in a bad way. Would for damn sure never risk her, you bellend.”

Buffy had no idea what the hell a ‘bell-end’ was, but she let it pass for now. “I’ve lost more blood on patrol and been fine, Xan. And…” He wouldn’t want to hear it, but they were probably well past the bounds of disclosure by now. “It’s a _lot_ better when the one you’re doing it with is yours,” she informed him quietly, and let her tone carry the rest of the unwanted information for her.

Realization flooded Xander’s face, and he went still as a stone. “I don’t wanna know this,” he muttered, looking away. It was a strange echo of the past. But to his credit, this time he didn’t stalk off.

“You did ask,” she reminded him, a little sadly.

He sighed heavily. And, after a long moment of wrestling with it, “Well, give credit where it’s due, at least you didn’t almost drain her, unlike some other vamps I could mention.”

“Ta ever so,” Spike answered dryly. “Kind of defeats the purpose to do that, when you want to keep the person about, yeah? Bein’ as you love ‘em?”

“And they’re a meal on tap, right?” he shot back grimly.

Spike froze up, hardening.

“Xander, dammit, it’s not like that. This is special…”

He whirled to face her, anxious and afraid-looking. “Are you thralled?”

Buffy was this close to disgusted with him. Fought it down, because she knew that she too had shared this prejudice, and not all that long ago. “For God’s sake, you’re the one who’s into that, not me. Spike doesn’t need thrall to get me to do this! I _chose_ it; so I could feel him wherever we are, and know he’s okay. So he can feel me. So I can stop feeling Angel all the damn time!” That earned her a stunned stare, and a slow perking of recognition. “And, because I _enjoy_ it, dammit!” She dropped her voice to a low, deadly register as she finally said what she had needed to say for a very damn long time. “And once and for all, you don’t get a say in what I do with my body, any more than you get a say in who I date or who I sleep with!” 

His face turned bleak. “Tell that to Jesse!”

“Wait; who the bloody hell is Jesse?”

/Oh, is _that_ what this is all about? _Still?/_

Xander was really tuned up now, as he vented the true source of his ire, his terror. “What if you make a mistake, or _he_ does? What if you get turned?” His eye jerked to Spike and away again, the old dread floating to the surface in a kneejerk, instinctive reaction. “What if your soul gets lost, and everything that’s wonderful and special about you, Buffy, gets destroyed in some kind of perversion of the… the act of love, by somebody who _says_ he loves you, but…” He sounded so anguished, so beyond choked up at the image of it that she _got_ it now. 

She finally got it. After all these years… So she stilled Spike’s growl with a squeeze of his hand and softened her tone. “Xander, two people have to participate in a siring. Do you think I’d ever choose that? If I was at that point, and it was that or go back to where I was, what do you think I’d pick?”

He blinked at her, clearly startled. Obviously that part had never occurred to him. She pursued the advantage before he could interrupt again. “And you can say all the things you want about Spike, but you know him well enough to know one thing for sure. Tell me you think he’d ever do _anything_ that would take him to a place where he’d have to see me die again?”

“I’d dust m’self first,” Spike broke in grimly. “And you bloody well know it, you git.”

Xander’s eye jerked away, not quite meeting Spike’s livid blues. “If it meant you got to keep her forever, though? Would you count that as her dying?”

The ferocious snarl that rumbled through Spike was an alarm. He was this close to vamping, only Buffy’s tight-clenched fingers on his hand holding him back from flying at Xander. Because Xan didn’t know what he was saying; what he had just stepped in there. /Oh God, Xander, shut the hell up. You really need to shut up, because you don’t know about the only person Spike ever sired so he could keep her forever… and you don’t know how that went at _all_./

She turned away briefly, faced her love. Touched his face. “Wait,” she whispered. 

He stilled. For her, he stilled. Jerked his head once in a nod that was all he had of control… and swiveled away from Xander to stare at the nearest wall while he fought to get himself back under wraps. She watched him for a brief moment to ensure that he had himself handled before she turned back to her friend. “Xander, I’m only going to say this one time, and then you better never bring it up again. Spike would _never_ want me to end up like that. For one thing, I might end up like Drusilla. We think she was a Potential; maybe even a Slayer. And it seems like Slayer-demons and adding a vamp one into the mix is a crazy-making plan, with the visions and everything; even without Angelus.” That caught Xander’s attention, made him gape. “And for another…” /And, far more importantly/ “…You can’t count on the new person in the mix liking you at all.”

“Wait, what?”

“Do you know how much I lucked out that William also loves me?”

_“Huh?”_

She wasn’t going to get into her theory about why. “If we introduced a new demon, she wouldn’t know Spike at all. She would have no reason to love him; might never learn to. Why would he want to take the risk of siring me if I might _hate_ him? Might walk off and leave him, with all that was left of me trapped in the back of the demon’s mind, screaming for him forever while he had to say goodbye, because the demon despised the both of us for loving each other?” Behind her, Spike made a small sound that was pure misery. Just hearing it made everything inside her want to curl up and die wondering what it would have been like if William had… /What if that part of you _hated_ me?/ To think of what it would be like to be trapped somewhere behind some demon’s control; to be torn away from Spike, was agony. To watch his devastation while she was dragged away from him forever by some creature who said hateful things to him with her mouth—hateful things like ‘Cecily’ had and like she had once thrown at him; a resurgent nightmare using her voice, her face to destroy him…

/ _God_ , no./ Neither of them would ever want that. They would both want her to die, first. _“Believe_ me, Xander, Spike wants me just the way I am. I want him just the way he is.” / _Hear_ me, dammit. This part is _all_ we want./ “I _chose_ this. I _invited_ it. I would’ve done it sooner, if I hadn’t been so damn ashamed of what I wanted; but I was, so I pushed it away.”

Xander looked poleaxed. “I don’t know if I can believe that, Buffy. I think… that whatever happened to you in LA…” He shook his head, staring down into the shadows of the corridor floor. “I think you changed a lot in this other dimension of yours.”

The conclusion was an unspoken thing. ‘I don’t know if I know you, anymore.’

Buffy turned a little, feeling the lifting of the weight in Spike, the slight alteration in pressure that said the crisis was past, and he had come back from the dark place. She caught his wrist and drew him close again. He came, sliding up once more to stand beside her, though pensive and frowning and clearly unwilling to deal with Xander anymore. “Yes,” she answered softly, and smiled as she re-threaded her fingers in his. “I changed a lot there. And so did Spike. But this… happened for the first time two days after I last saw you.” 

Xander blanched… but he’d needed to know. This wasn’t a new Buffy, all down with the bite-y and everything. This Buffy was still the same one he’d known ever since Spike had died. /That change you’re seeing? It happened the day I saw my guy go up in a blaze of glory. Maybe before. But definitely then; when I knew I’d give up anything to get him back./ “Xander, I went to LA to make a commitment… and I did. I’m not ashamed of it. This is just as much a part of who I am as being Dawn’s sister, or your friend, or being a Slayer. People are just gonna have to deal.”

That brought a new jolt of terror to Xander’s eye. It jerked over to the open doorway, to the room full of anxious voices, the rising and falling cadence of the action council. “You can’t tell them,” he insisted, low and urgent. “It’ll destroy them.”

Spike, staunch at her back. It would be what it would be. “It might. But I’m not going to lie. We can’t. This is who we are.”

That brought a new freshet of rage. “Dammit, Buffy, don’t be selfish! They need to be strong, and sure of who they are, or this whole thing’ll fall apart. If you don’t care about their lives…” The scarred face clenched. “This is all I have left, Buffy. Being this, doing this. Please; don’t take it away from me.”

The unexpected plea tore at her, rocked her to her core. _Was_ she being selfish? Trying to be too much for everyone? Was Spike right, that she had to pick him or the world first, but that she could not have both, even if they were fighting the same fight? She had believed that it wouldn’t matter in the end, had told herself that as long as they were both pointed in the same direction she was allowed to love him without any contradictions in her Calling, her Slayer-ness, any of it… because there would be no clash of purpose, no hard choices to be made. They might still be opposites in many ways… but no longer in any way that fundamentally mattered. Not in any way that came to the fight, to the work, so it should not matter when it came to priorities. 

But if her priorities clashed… “I’ve never let my own needs stand in the way of the work, Xander.” It burst out harshly, because she was shaken and less sanguine than she had been on the way down. “But I’ve paid my damn dues. If people want me and what I offer, they’re going to have to take me at face value. I’ve _earned_ my peace.”

Xander stared at her as if she’d lost her mind. “Now I _know_ you’re not the Buffy I used to know. You once told me that you loved Angel more than you would ever love anything, and you _killed_ him. Now you’re saying you’d prioritize letting Spike nibble on your neck over the safety of the entire Slayer _Organization_ …”

She blanched. “I’m saying that they’re big girls, and they should be able to tell the difference between my special case and their own situation. They’ve had to learn what they are, and they’ll deal with it. I had to, they will too! They’ll evolve, or they won’t make it. And yeah,” she hissed, all of it welling up in frustration, “I killed Angel. It makes it damn hard to let go of your first love when you had to do that. You think nothing will ever compare, because anything else would be a betrayal. I _had_ to believe it, because if I didn’t, everything we all went through wouldn’t have been worth it.” She heard Spike’s hiss of realization, ignored it to forge on. “But I know the difference now between a pretty teenage picture and the real thing. The thing that keeps a person from becoming a machine; the machine I became _because_ I did that. I won’t _be_ that anymore.” 

Xander reeled back in shock, mouthing her name. She didn’t let him get a word in edgewise. He needed to _know_. “And do you know who keeps me from turning back into that machine?” She fumbled behind herself, caught his free hand. “ _Spike_. So the one thing I’m _not_ going to do, _ever_ , is lose him, because I already have once, and that taught me pretty profoundly what I can live without and do the job, and what I need to keep doing it at all!”

“Buffy.” Spike slipped his left hand away, set it to her shoulder. And to her shock he was pulling up the collar of her shirt. “Now’s not the time.”

She swung around to gape at him, stunned.

“We need to get on, and handle this war. After, maybe, we’ll deal with this. But right now, we’ve got to come up with a plan. And the birds in there have enough to be getting on with without dealing with our business.”

She was floored. She would never have thought Spike would be the one to hide his claim, hide what they shared. _She_ might once have done so, but not so much now. That was the old Buffy, the one who was ashamed of what she did with William the Bloody. Now… It was none of their damn business. Even more so, since they should so not be following in her footsteps anymore, and she no longer felt she had a single thing to prove to anyone, or stand up for, or anything. And he knew where she stood on that, so why was he…

“Now’s not the time,” he repeated, and his eyes, warm on hers in the semi-darkness, told her she didn’t need to prove anything to him or for him, with anyone. He pointed with his chin. “Now, go on and be the leader they need, yeah?”

He wasn’t asking for this right now. He was actually asking her to table it. Which led her to ask herself… was she fighting so hard for her own reasons, or because she wanted him to know she wasn’t ashamed? And the answer was… maybe both. Which meant he had just as much say on when. And that made it both their decision, to be made jointly; whether to come out, and how. 

It made all the old, cold rage—at Xander, at Giles, at everyone who had ever judged her for her passions, her needs—drain away. Left her feeling just… tired. /Okay, fine. We wait./ Squaring her shoulders, she nodded briskly. Swept past Xander to head for the room. And didn’t miss the look of curious, almost-grateful surprise from the latter as he watched Spike follow her in.

They caused the hell of a stir when they marched through the door. Satsu was the first to come to her feet, eyes glowing in clear relief at her appearance, before careening to obvious concern at the appearance of blood all over her neck, face, arms, and hands… and oh, hell, Spike might be right about her. Dammit. Of course, that was a whole other problem right now, but… Dammit. “General! You’re alive!”

Any who hadn’t noticed their entry swung round or stopped mid-discussion to watch as they approached the table, which felt a bit overwhelming. When Buffy felt overwhelmed, she quipped. “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” she informed them wryly.

Behind her, Spike and Xander groaned in unison, then no doubt glared at each other for daring to agree on anything. 

/All’s right with the world again, I guess/ she thought sadly. /Spike and Xander are back at each other’s throats, I have to hide at least some of my relationship with Spike from the world so I can fight the good fight, and Spike has to sit back and be number two for today./ 

God, sometimes she really hated being what she was.

***

“What do we do, Boss? We can’t fight this!”

“Watcher was saying we should try to come up with some kind of Kevlar, but we don’t even have anything metal around…”

“We need something to shoot back with! Something that goes further than a crossbow!”

“Yeah; the ruddy bastards are stayin’ just out of range! They _know_ what we’ve got…”

“We’re all going to die here…”

“Just hold up. Quiet, everyone, please. Calm down.” Buffy turned to Xander, sitting as usual at her left and very stoically avoiding staring at the blood-smeared landscape of her neck above her collar. Caught his stony, one-eyed gaze. “Is that true? There’s got to be some metal around here somewhere.”

Kicked out of his lip-picking, bitter study, his expression jerked back into focus. “Oh. Uh, yeah. We have some, uh, old tin roofing stuff. Just a little, rusting away over in the corner by Dawn’s stable. We used it to patch the roof before we got her in there, so she wouldn’t get rained on. And, uh… there are some beam ends left over from shoring up the south wall…”

“Well, can we use those to make armor for at least some of our people? So we can man the walls in shifts without worrying we’re going to lose half the garrison every time we do?”

He stared for a moment, clearly nonplussed. “Buffy, that’s tempered steel. And thin sheets of, like, zinc and aluminum with a silicon coating. We might, just _might_ be able to manage something with those, if we hammer ‘em out flat…” His mouth twisted grimly. “Though the silicon would flake off and they’d rust eventually. The ends would be sharp as hell and cut the girls up, but if we layered ‘em… maybe.” He shook his head then, in complete denial. “But there’s just not enough. The beams… You’d need a foundry. And we so don’t have the stuff to make one of those, here.”

Buffy’s mind raced, pondering the possibilities. /Wil, why aren’t you here?/ Surely there were spells to make the crossbows shoot further, spells to make a material stretch or change shape, shielding spells… All things they could use, all things that had been within her reach when she’d had Willow and Tara, and all things that were impossible now, because she didn’t.

She, like Wil, had gotten way too dependent on the magicks. She had gotten way too used to having a witch around, to call on when needed. Her fault as much as Willow’s that her best friend had gotten hooked. And yet… She lived in a supernatural world, fighting supernatural creatures. Not exactly shocking that sometimes the standard, real-world answers would not suffice. That the magicks were necessary… and how ironic that right now it was a prosaic, mainstream weapon, a stupid gun, that was causing her the most trouble—just like with Warren—and demanding the response of magick because nothing else seemed to be footing the bill. 

She kind of wished she had the books from Wolfram and Hart available to her right now. Those ‘spell-by-numbers’ ones she’d used to help Angel; the ones the firm had had around to help out the most tediously unaccomplished lawyers do little useful paper-cut healings and office-wardings to cover their stupid lawyer-espionage practices and whatever. Because right now what they could really use was a handy little ‘Magicks For Dummies’ course. They didn’t need a full-time Wicca so much as just enough magick to keep enough of them safe and alive through a counter-assault to get to some of those guns, and then maybe they’d have a chance to fight back.

It struck her then, like a lightning bolt. “Obviously from now on the Slayer Organization is going to need to add some modern weapons to the armament. But for now…” She jerked her eyes over to Xander. “We need to get on the line with Giles. Ask him if there are any super-easy spells that can be used to change the shape and, I dunno, chemical structure or whatever of your girder things, so we can flatten them out quick and cut it into the shapes we need. And another really super-easy spell to use as a shield that could cover maybe, I dunno, only the front of a few people at once. Nothing huge; just a few feet by a few feet. Something an untrained person could manage, with help…”

Xander gaped at her, totally confused. “Buffy, no one here is a witch…”

He really was stupid sometimes. “Xander, you once set a book on fire just by reading a line out of it in Latin. And you don’t even know how to _pronounce_ Latin…”

“Oh, yeah?” Spike asked, sounding faintly impressed. “Bitty witch, are you?”

Xander ignored him. “That was a total accident! And anyway, Wil said that doing magick requires being all… in tune with the forces of nature, and mega-concentration and stuff. I’m just a guy, not a warlock…”

“I bloody hope not,” Daphne broke in grimly, “since being one of those means you’re into the Dark Magicks, and that’s a road you oughtn’t to go down whether you’ve the aptitude or no.”

“But Wil said…”

Daphne’s tones were uncompromising. “Then your friend was using Dark Magicks. ‘Warlock’ means ‘oathbreaker’. It’s a term for men who use Dark Magicks. If you’re not using negative magicks, doing things that control people and harm them and the like, you’d be a witch, just like a woman would be. That word and ‘witch’ aren’t gendered, no matter what the films say. It just means ‘wise one’. Wicca denotes a follower of the religion; someone who, any road, oughtn’t to be using Dark Magicks. Witch just means you have the aptitude. Sometimes you’re both, sometimes they’re mutually exclusive. Neither,” she finished with a faint smirk, “indicates whether you have a prick or not."

Xander stared. Buffy sat back as well, surprised. /Well, you learn something new every day./ “How do you know so much about it, Daphne?” she asked quietly.

Daphne turned away from Xander to eye her, frowning slightly. “My sister’s Wiccan and a witch. Damn good one, too. And bloody passionate about the difference. Hates like hell when people use that word; warlock. Winds her right up.”

/Good enough./ “Alright, Daphne, you just got put on the magicks task force with Xander.” At her startled look Buffy held up a hand. “We don’t have time to argue. I get that it’s your sister that’s the witch, just like it’s our missing friend Willow who’s the other one, but we don’t have them right now. Xander has an aptitude and you have the knowledge…”

Xander interrupted, sounding scared. “Buffy, that was a one-off. That book was probably just spelled to work really well if someone read the words. I don’t have the… concentration and the connection and the… The ‘will-be-done-ness’ to do all that… _stuff_. You can’t put this all on me just because…”

“It wasn’t just the one time, Xander. You also have every demon-girl within a twenty-mile radius attracted to you… and even a few demon-guys. You’re attracted to them, almost to the exclusion of humans; me included, once upon a time. 'Cause when Amy did that love-spell for you—the one that was just supposed to be about Cordelia—it totally magnified when it hit you, and took on like everyone female in town...” 

"But… Hellmouth hijinks!" Xander interrupted, looking horrified. "Spells just go kerflooey on the hellmouth, right? Or, they did. Wil always said…"  
  
Buffy shook her head, because no. It was more than that, and something had just occurred to her. Something she probably should have thought of long ago; about spells, and will-be-done-ness. “It happened again, Xander. With the will-be-done spell. We know what kind of demon-magnet Wil meant, but you somehow managed to repel them from doing… stuff to you when they came, which I think says more about how your mojo worked _against_ the spell than how _she_ was working it, because look how Spike and I reacted to the thing.”/And why did I never think of that before now? Because no one said we had to, you know, be all lovey-dovey just because we were ‘getting married’. That was probably all on us, or at least all on our demons, jumping at the chance to play house. But we had a lot of will to bring to bear on things./ “If you could change how the spell reacted to you too, Xan… that means you also have your share of power.”

Xander looked utterly shocked by this interpretation of his time in the Scoobies. She didn’t give him a minute to protest. She had given this a lot of thought while she was in Hell-A. “I think there might be a little more to you than meets the eye when it comes to magickal aptitude, but we just never saw it, because everyone was so busy focusing on Willow and Tara, and because we were so used to thinking of you as ‘the regular guy’. But take it from me; you don’t have to be majorly powerful to pull off an easy spell if it’s well-constructed magick. Not if you’re familiar with how magick works. And obviously there are plenty of people out there who have a little aptitude; especially if you grew up on a hellmouth. If your family’s from there. I mean, look at how many people were in those groups Willow and Tara and Amy used to go to.” 

Xander started at that, clearly amazed all over again at the thought that generations of hellmouth living might have permeated his DNA or something, but it wasn’t like he’d be the first, right? “Heck, it’s not like it even takes that. It’s not even uncommon. Look at Giles and his little circle of pals and all the trouble they got into when they were kids. I mean, they didn’t even grow up on a hellmouth like you and Willow. Neither did Tara, but Giles is kind of a massive mojo guy, and so was she, right?” Xander stared at her as if she was speaking Cantonese. “I’m just saying, maybe you’ve got something, and Giles avoided mentioning it because he didn’t want to encourage you. Because he was afraid to send you down a wrong road, like the one he took.”

“But… I’m… I’m just the guy who fixes things!”

“Maybe. And maybe you can be the guy who fixes this. The guy who bends metal; but with a spell instead of a foundry; because that’s what we need right now, Xan. Just think of it as another tool.” And when he gawked at her, she smiled reassuringly at him. “Even if you don’t believe me, there are paint-by-numbers spells. I used a couple in Hell-A to heal Angel, when his back was broken in three places and his legs were bones sticking through skin and there were zero hospitals to fix him up. He was walking again in two weeks.” 

“Why was Angel…” Xander was almost stuttering by now with incredulity.

“Because he was human for a while. It’s not important.” She drilled her eyes into her oldest friend. “Xander, you and Spike both know I’m no witch, so that should tell you something, that I was able to do that.” She leaned over the table, planted her knuckles on the wood. “This can _work_. You just have to concentrate hard enough, get meditate-y, need it bad enough… and _believe_.”

Xander subsided back into his chair, looking cowed and thoughtful, and man, she really was screwing everyone’s self-image left and right lately, wasn’t she? “Rowena, get on the horn with St. Petersburg. Wake them up. I need Giles.”

“Aye, Boss.”

Giles was rousted out of bed eventually, shoved in on the grainy video call. And, glasses on, his tired eyes came into sharp focus the instant he saw the blood on her face, her neck. “Buffy?”

“No time for that now, Giles. We’re under attack, and the Scourge are using guns. We don’t have any ourselves, and we’re not exactly loaded with Kevlar vests here. Willow’s God knows where, and we need help _now_.” She noted as she spoke that Spike had melted off to the side, keeping himself out of range of the camera. She was well-aware of why. If Giles caught sight of him, the call would devolve into a side-conversation about his resurrection and turn into a whole lot of useless exclamations and ‘Good Lords!’ and demands for an explanation for his existence, and they’d totally derail off of the desperately important subject at hand. “We need a couple of easy spells that Xander and one of our slayers, Daphne, can do; paint-by-numbers stuff…”

“Buffy, without an accomplished Wicca…”

“Giles, don’t put me off. I know these easy-bake spells exist and that you don’t have to be some kind of incredibly powerful witch to make them work. I used that kind of thing when I was in LA, as triage to keep someone alive and to heal him. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later; but you and I both know Xander has an aptitude you never wanted to mention. I think you were trying to save him from himself. Maybe you saw yourself in him, a little, or one of your old friends or something…”

She did not miss the flinch. She knew Xander saw it too. But Giles did not prevaricate, his voice instead going extremely quiet. “Buffy, I… The risk of exposing someone who has no experience with the magicks to that kind of temptation…”

Xander sat down hard behind her in his seat. 

“It’s _Xander_ , Giles. He knows the danger. If he goes off the rocks later we’ll get him counseling.” It might have made her reconsider, knowing where her friend was right now. But they were desperate. She just had to pray that this wouldn’t destroy him. /He has Wil. She’ll come back for him, help him get through it if he gets hooked. And maybe he won’t even be able to get hooked, if he doesn’t have the level of ability she has./ “We’ll all be there for him. But right now, people are _dying_.” 

Giles flinched. She kept hitting him, the general facing down her former drill sergeant. /Pick up what I’m putting down, Giles. I’m not taking no for an answer./ “So you’re gonna help us. We need one that can shield maybe five people, and one that we can use to flatten out steel girders…”

“Beams,” Xander murmured. “Not girders.”

She threw him an exasperated look for the pedantry. “…So we can turn them into armor…”

“Buffy, what you’re asking for; it’s…”

“Giles, if you don’t help us we’re all going to die in here like rabbits in a trap. Or like I did when Warren shot me, left bleeding out on the ground.” She closed her eyes as the pain lanced through her, leaving behind that awful ache made of all the might-have-beens. “The way Tara did, alone upstairs, with the blood soaking into the rug, so that we never got it out of the floor. And this time there won’t be any coming back from it.”

The pain in Giles’ voice was tight, ratcheting deep. “Xander, bring whoever it is who will be helping you and I’ll… I’ll find the right books and join you shortly.”

“You got it, G-man.” Xan’s voice shook as he said it, but it was very suddenly steely with determination.

She stepped away from the screen, to Spike. Xander took her place, Daphne leaving her station to join him. She watched them as Spike received her, shaken though she tried to hide it, and pressed herself against his cool, reassuring body. 

“Don’t worry,” Spike murmured, low and for her ears alone. His arm wrapped tight around her waist while everyone watched the show at the monitors, and his head bent to that his lips were near her ear. “If Harris gets the yen for it, at least now we know the signs, yeah?”

She dropped her hands to cover his fists. Drew in a deep, trembling breath and held it. /Since magick addiction is a little more toxic even than alcohol, and I’m selfishly throwing him right into the deep end here. Because I always do what’s ‘expedient’ in the moment, no matter what it costs everyone in the long run./

“You’re doing fine, luv. You always pull it out. We won’t let it be otherwise.”

She tightened her grip on his hand, there to receive her as always. “I propose and you and the team dispose?” she asked lightly, voice a little shaken. The thought that she might be damning Xander to follow in Willow’s footsteps was a terrifying thought that had in no way occurred to her until Giles had brought it up.

“We’ve always done,” Spike answered quietly, staunch and firm. “You come up with a plan. We all work together to carry it out. Chop and change if we need to. You lift us all up with the force of your bloody brilliant personality. And in the end, we come out the other side on top, because you’re a bleedin’ wonder.”

“Because we all are,” she answered, and bore down hard on his grip. Leaned her head back on his shoulder. The sounds of magickal discussion picked up again over by the screens, Daphne already scribbling notes on something while Xander nodded and replied, terse and anxious, to Giles instructions. The rest of the room watched in tense silence. “Do you think it’ll work?”

“Buffy, I wouldn’t bet against you if your plan sounded like the most idiot thing I’d ever heard. Know better, don’t I?” His smile was a living thing against her hair. “How many times did you manage to wreck my every sodding plot, when you were just a wee bird in secondary?”  
  
She smiled and closed her eyes for just the smallest second, tired now beyond belief. “Well, to be fair, your plots were always kind of rushed.”

His voice was amused and knowing against her scalp. “Operatic and lovely… till I got bored.”

“See, I didn’t wreck anything. I couldn’t even keep a pen working without breaking it squeezing too hard. I think you just got anxious and jumped the gun all the time because you overestimated me and kept shooting yourself in the foot.”

“No, Buffy,” he whispered, and kissed the top of her head. “In the end, you were always going to win. The battle, and my heart.”

She breathed it in, silent and buoyed by it. “So we’re gonna win this?”

“Changed the nature of the Slayer-killer, yeah? Think you can do anything.”

_“We_ can do anything,” she amended softly, and held on tight to the arms banded tight around her waist. Ignored the eyes drifting to them, watching, as they waited.

***  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
(As a side-note, I didn't do it because I think there can't be regular humans in the world, or that everyone has to be supernatural or have powers, or that I don't think Xander's cool just as he is. Actually, as a pagan I fully believe every single person on earth (with very few exceptions, and those to do with close-mindedness) have the ability to use their will to perform what we call 'magicks'... but that's beside the point. More; I believe depending on the episode, the show hinted at this thing with Xander a few times but never followed through with it; that he had some of the same aptitudes, at a very low level, as Giles had, but that Xan had a mental block about it, had himself convinced he was 'the boring-normal human one', so it's something I headcanoned for years.   
  
Anyway, we'll see how it pans out.)


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here I am, still owing a ton of replies, because life is doing that thing. So sorry; y'all really do mean tons to me, I swear. Man, you know what? I forgot it was even Thursday. I swear, this quarantine thing makes me forget what day it even is. I'm losing my damn mind. The days just DRAG on... but the weeks go by in this blur...
> 
> Anyhoo... Here's more, for what it's worth. I'll hit you all back ASAP, you wonderful humans!!!
> 
> (Note: After a serious amount of last-minute Latin-wrangling using a site called Yandex, because Google-translate is le suck, and with some advice from y'all wonderful humans who answered the plaintive whining I threw out on a Spuffy FB group, maaaaaybe the 'spell' on here is somewhat more passable than the gibberish I originally had in the draft, lol)

Xander and Daphne were working the spell, sitting next to a huge pile of scattered metal in the courtyard brought to them by various of the uninjured slayerettes. Dawn, having emerged from the stable to throw herself bodily at Buffy and Spike and damn near knocking them down in her gratitude for their survival, was now basically wormed in between them, and was squeezing them to her sides and kind of in front of them as she watched, quizzical and confused. 

Their trio was warming in the night, and helpful for keeping all the stares of uncomfortable surmise from creeping Buffy out. Not that it had changed anything about Satsu’s basically constant, sick eyeballing of her like she had done something completely out of character and totally uncalled-for. 

Buffy had opened her eyes at one point during the magick-lesson down in the command room to find her second staring at her and Spike with this totally nauseous expression, like someone had kicked her right in the guts and she was on the verge of throwing up; face pale, hands shaking, and jeez. Was it because she was with a vamp, or because she was off the market? Because if it was the former, fine. Have a cow. But if it was the latter… She had so never been on the market for a girl, so this didn’t change anything, whatever Satsu had maybe been hoping for somewhere in the back of her mind, and dammit, she really needed to talk to Willow. About a lot more, apparently, than her new worries for Xander, or to win a bet with Spike about this whole stupid Faith thing. /I miss you, Wil./

“So,” Dawn asked all conversationally, “the plan is to armor-up some Slayers and just march out with, like, a little magick shield across the front rank or whatever, and then get into crossbow range and start shooting? And then get into hand-to-hand combat range and start kicking their butts? And take their guns and fight back?”

“Approximately,” Buffy agreed, aware her voice sounded very grim. As plans went, it was thin. Very thin, with too many really super bad variables to manage on the fly… but it was what they had. “As soon as we start leaving behind a lot of corpses, more of our people can come up behind us, using the main body as a shield, pick up more guns behind us and make with the rearguard. By the time we get a really good wedge going, we might even have the advantage.” /Of course, there’s that really rotten midsection between when there’s way too many of them and way too few of us, where most of us will be unprotected by either armor or magicks, and they can just collapse around us, outflank us, crush us between them, and that’ll be it…/

Dawn frowned as if she clearly thought there was a problem with this plan. As did every Slayer in the place, and… Well, Spike was already pissed off enough about it to set her teeth vibrating with his unspoken protests. “Um, that sounds… really dangerous. How, um… much armor can Xander and Daphne get out of…” She waved her hand at the metal miscellany stacked over there. At the moment only maybe a tiny ripple fluttered in the air over the pile as the slow chanting waxed and waned—which was admittedly something—but then Xander shook his head and stopped. Frowned, shook his head, started again. 

“Maybe enough for ten of us,” Buffy answered, trying not to feel really hopeless about it.

The chanting halted again. “I dunno,” Xander muttered, sounding deeply disillusioned. “If I’m supposed to feel connected and confident, I’m really not. I don’t know if I can do this…”

He was thinking too much. Whenever he’d done something by accident, it had been when he was so not under pressure, just goofing around. 

Disengaging herself from sister and lover, Buffy strode closer. Uncrossed her arms and put her hands on his shoulders. “You can do this, Xander.”

The tense shoulders hunched. “I don’t think so. I mean, why would he not tell me a long time ago, if he thought I could…” A note of betrayal entered his voice then. “Why wouldn’t he let me know that… I was more than a glorified bricklayer? Why would he let me believe, all this time, that I was just… boring normal guy, if he thought I could actually, you know, accomplish something _useful?”_

Buffy thought there were two possible answers to that. One, he hadn’t been paying any attention. Or, he’d been afraid. And she pretty much thought that Giles was way too attention-to-detail-guy to have missed this. He had done such a weird combination, back in the day, of dismissing all of her young friends, and watching them like a hawk. When you added in the fact that he had been so completely blasé and dismissive of the whole ‘setting a book on fire with words’ thing… in retrospect that whole thing just really set off alarm bells in Buffy’s head. /He was squashing it./ “Because he wanted to save you,” she answered softly. “Wanted to spare you becoming like Willow. Like himself. Like his friends who died. He thought… you’d be happier that way. That you could get free from this world, if you wanted.”

That snapped his head up, and the one eye met hers. “And if I got killed because I couldn’t defend myself?” The single eye blazed; an eye he might not have lost if it were true, and she knew he was thinking it, now.

“Maybe he never counted on you sticking it out. Maybe he never understood you the way I did, or at least he hoped… you’d move on. Or maybe…” She looked away, out into the night. “Maybe he thought… he was sparing you the mistakes he made before you ended up taking the road he did, in the end. Because you did, Xander. You became what he was, right? Just a mostly-normal guy who fought the good fight anyway.”

That deflated him. “Yeah. I guess so.” He sighed heavily. “Man. It’s really hard to believe it, though, Buffy. That I could do this, just because one time I set a book on fire, and because I have a thing for demon-women.”

“They have a thing for you, too, Xan. Don’t forget. And then there was Sweet. And Dracula…”

“Stop it. Seriously.”

“And don’t lie. I think you don’t mind Spike as much as you pretend…”

“I will _kill_ you, Buffy, if you finish that sentence. I love you, but I _will_ kill you.”

She smirked to herself, because ‘riled up’ was a lot better than ‘overwhelmed and despondent’. “I mean it. You can do this. Just breathe and remember…” Okay, what would work for a guy who was the most personally unconfident guy ever when it came to anything remotely supernatural; a guy who had finally made his peace with being ‘the normal one’? “Remember that you kept a woman like Anya interested for years. Remember all the others. There must be something about you that draws ‘em in, right? I think you have a little something. Maybe it just comes from being a descendant of a hellmouth-y family, right?”

Xander grunted, because as theories went, it wasn’t like that was too off the wall. They’d seen enough to know that was true, by far. The long-term-effects of that place were _real_. “I’m not saying you have to trade in your carpenter-guy badge or anything… but maybe all these years with the weird have rubbed off a little.” She squeezed his shoulders. “Dig deep. Find that part of you I know is there; the guy who always comes through in the clutch and is whatever the group needs him to be.” Another tight squeeze, and she let go, stepped back. “You’re the heart, Xander Harris. _Use_ that.”

Leaning back a little, he watched her go… and then something rose up in his face, and he took a deep breath. Nodded, and straightened. “Alright. One more time, Daphne?”

As Buffy returned to her party the London Slayer nodded. “Right then. From the top. _‘Mollit, tenues, propagationem’…”_

Xander repeated the Latin incantation dutifully, but this time with greater concentration, voice somehow both calm and fierce. _“‘Te sunt ut lutum ad vocem meam… Flectere ad voluntatem meam… Fiat, quod ego requiram…’”_

“Soften, thin, spread,” Spike murmured to into the night, voice a low, sexy-smooth rumble of easy translation. “You are as clay to my voice. Bend to my will, become that which I require…”

“You really should speak Latin to me in bed sometime.” It came out thoughtlessly, for the moment not at all cognizant of Dawn’s presence at her back.

The low rumble turned to a quiet chuckle, which was interrupted by Dawn’s, “Okay, _ew!”_

Buffy flushed, turned her attention firmly back on the spread of metal junk on the cobblestones, the two hunched figures under pale floodlights in the surrounding gloom.

_“‘Invenire ignis in… Texo vestri frigore flamma ad vitam… Et flectere ut verbis loquar…’”_

“Find the fire within. Stroke thy cold flame to life, and mold to the work of my tongue…” Spike’s voice was starting to take on a seriously sensual undertone that was just totally unfair, considering her still-unsatisfied state. 

“C’mon, they so aren’t saying that!” she hissed at him.

“Swear to Christ, Slayer.” He smirked. “It’s the hell of a sexy spell our Rupert found for the kiddies, yeah?” 

He opened his mouth to go on translating. Buffy, vibrating, dug her fingernails into his arm. “You’re gonna have to stop. Seriously.”

He snapped his teeth shut and just stood there like a smug jerk, curling his tongue behind them. Buffy resolutely looked away toward the pile of useless metal chunks, fighting to avoid staring at his mouth.

“You two are really worrying me,” Dawn said conversationally. “If I ever get to live in the same house with you again, remind me to invest in soundproofing.”

/No, if you’re ever the right size to live in a house again, your butt’s going back to college. And then we will have all the sex we want without you ‘ew’ing at us./ Though… Spike would really miss Dawn, and Dawn would really miss Spike, and maybe Buffy might be convinced to give them till at least the start of the regular academic year to get all caught up before she dispatched her hopefully-restored sister back to Berkeley.

Still pondering the future, should they get out of this mess, she watched the spell sightlessly for a minute or two. Nothing seemed to be happening for the longest time. They went through the chant twice, and despair was starting to creep in… but then the barest glow of energy began to emerge from the items in the pile. The light did not seem to be emanating from the weak mechanic’s lights, suspended from hooks all around to cast ghostly shadows on every paving stone, nor did it come from anyone’s flashlights. It was very clearly originating from the metal itself; like the stuff was getting hot without source. 

“Ooooh,” Dawn whispered. “That’s cool.”

“Shh, Niblet. Don’t bugger up their concentration.”

The stuff got brighter and brighter, till the brilliant glow actually started to get painful to look at. Buffy finally jerked her watering eyes to the side, hissing. “How are they still sitting right there? That _has_ to be putting off a ton of heat…”

“If it worked that way we’d be feeling it too, from here,” Spike answered, calmly reasonable. “‘Magine the spell’s just stirrin’ the molecules about fast enough to make the stuff loosen up.” He tilted his head to the side, squinting at the glow. “Gonna set off the hell of a charge, though, yeah, when it pops?”

Buffy blinked at him, painful eyes still feeling seared with afterimages. “Since when are you Mr. Science Guy?”

He shrugged. “You’ve really no idea how much telly I watched when I couldn’t be a proper vamp, do you Buffy? There was sod all else to do. Was bored out of my skull most days, until…” He stopped abruptly, and his voice dropped to a slightly lower register, tightened a little. “Till I got a hobby. Probably have a bloody PhD in American Television Broadcasting and another degree in documentaries just for somethin’ to pass the time.”

Till he got a hobby. /Being Buffy’s sex toy and occasional punching bag./ Well… she supposed she hadn’t seen him watch TV much during that period. After all, it wasn’t like she’d given him a lot of time for other recreation. 

She wouldn’t have let him finish a show, anyway, if she’d come in wanting his attention in the moment. She’d just have turned it off and pushed him against the wall, so he’d probably learned really quickly in that four-and-a-half months to just avoid getting too involved in any storylines, if he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life wondering what had happened while she was otherwise making use of him. Not that he had seemed all that reluctant to give her all of his attention, but... “Why didn’t you… you know, do what you did later?” she asked softly. “Pass the time out at bars, or…”

He shrugged. “Used to be more confident out in the world. Round humans and round other demons. Lost a lot of that for a while in dear old Sunnyhell. Turned into a bit of a hermit, innit? Couldn’t go to Willys or wherever without endin’ up in a fight half the time, since I’d turned gray hat… and did you find me out at some human bar you’d’ve probably read me the riot act and dragged me back to my crypt by my hair, so best to just stay put.”

God, she’d really fenced him in. /I made your world so small, Spike. How in the hell didn’t you hate me?/ “Spike…”

“Look there,” he interrupted, and pointed with his chin. “There it goes…”

She supposed the interruption was timely. It was clear why he didn’t want to talk about it in mixed company. 

Dawn’s voice, as she tuned in, was slightly pained-sounding. “Wow. Um, do you think we should step back or something?”

They would come back to it later. Especially since the metal stuff looked like it was about to explode. It was so white-hot that it was impossible to look at it dead on, and it was rattling oddly; a strange, dull sound like it was almost… rubbery.

And then, abruptly, all of it just… deflated. Like a bunch of balloons losing air. Lost its shapes, turning into a whole bunch of flattened puddles of metal-goop things, like those floppy, portable black holes from the _Looney Tunes_ skits about Wile-E-Coyote and the Roadrunner. Xander and Daphne jumped back with loud shouts of dismay to avoid being touched by any of them, Xander slapping at his jeans as if afraid they had been contaminated, and oh god, had he been burned or… 

“Wow, it worked!”

Oh. He was okay. And he sounded… really proud of himself, actually. “Good job, Xan,” she called across the intervening space. “And you, Daphne, thank you. Excellent work, both of you.”

“Cheers,” Daphne called, sounding a little awed. “Brilliant.”

“Yeah,” Xander breathed, voice full of wonder. Then his eye turned to Buffy’s… and it was shining in a way that she had not seen in a very long time. “I actually _did_ it!”

/Oh. Oh man…/ Was he just proud to have accomplished something helpful… or was he high on the magicks? On the rush of it? “Yeah,” she managed as heartily as she could, but knew her voice was shaking. “You did great!”

Spike’s hand on her shoulder soothed. “We’ll keep an eye on him,” he murmured for her ears alone.

Unfortunately, Dawn heard it somehow. “What for? He’s just happy it worked, right?”

“Of course, Niblet,” Spike answered before Buffy could; probably because he could lie better than she could. “Let’s go see about how to make the stuff into armor, next thing.”

“Well, I don’t know about either of you, but I never took metal shop…”

Buffy snorted in agreement as she headed toward the lit square with Spike and her giant sister at her heels. “So. Xan, how much do we have? Enough to make little Kevlar jackets for at least ten people, you think?”

Xander stared at the now-flat pile of metal and scratched at his head, clearly still roaring with good humor over his success. Then, squatting abruptly, he reached out to touch one of the ‘puddles’. Buffy’s hand shot out automatically to try to stop him, terrified he’d be hurt, but he was already pulling away to flop his arm over his thigh. “They’re cool.” He shot her a thoughtful look, the too-bright light in his eye dialing down to ‘calculating’. “About five-sixteenths thick. They’ll make for a heavy vest, but they’ll work, I think. I remember that being about how thick the plates were in the vest I…” He frowned. “Though, hopefully this shield spell will also work to slow down the bullets first, because the problem with using just standard steel or any other metal for ballistic armor is, the force of the bullet causes the metal to spall off, and we don’t have an spall-resistant coating…”

Buffy just stared at him. “Xander, you do realize no one here knows what the hell you’re talking about, right?”

One very intense eye turned to meet hers in the low light. “Shrapnel, Buffy, from when the bullet impact shatters the steel. It’s rigid, you know? It doesn’t spread the force the way fibers or ceramic does. Spalling might not kill a Slayer, but it won’t feel good, and it’ll probably take years to work it out of your bodies. And judging by Spike’s expression when he talked about pushing bullets out after the fact, that sounds kind of un-fun.”

/Un-fun. That sounds about right for a war./ “But we’ll be alive, right?”

He didn’t waver. “A lot more than yesterday.”

“Well, then. That’s plan A.”  
  
“Okay.” He picked up one of the heavy, flat, oddball shapes between his fingers. Lifted it on its edge and eyed it pensively. “I’m gonna have to figure out how to cut ‘em. Bend ‘em… But I guess this’ll make… enough to get away with the plan.”

“You’re amazing.”

He smiled that little one-sided smile of his. “Hey. I’m your handyman. And, apparently, part-time man-witch, right?”

“You’re a whole lot of things, Xander. And all of them very special.”

He nodded his thanks and turned back to the puzzle at hand, frowning at the metal sheets.

Daphne, standing a little apart from the scene, stepped toward them, notes in hand. “He, er… did very well. I don’t know if his estimation of his abilities is at all accurate, considering that this sort of thing…” She paused, as if she were afraid to say more, then shrugged and faced Buffy head on. “If he had trouble prior to this, manifesting the ability, maybe it was through a lack of focus that he now has in abundance?”

“A lack of confidence,” Buffy answered with a little shake of her head. “One of our teachers once; she was a technopagan. And Willow told me once that a lot of people were into Wiccan-y things at her college, that a few of the girls’ boyfriends were into it too, and that she and Tara were by far not the only people who had abilities. And I get the idea that there were a lot of people who were getting hooked by this warlock guy who haunted the streets where we lived, so it wasn’t like it was a rare gift…”

“There were a lot of people in there,” Dawn agreed. “At Rack’s place. It scared me how many came in and out while I waited, that one time…”

“Bloody lot of people can do a bit of magick,” Spike growled. “‘Specially if they came of age on a hellmouth, got it all mixed in with childhood an’ puberty swirlin’ about in the brain. Enough to get it in their blood. Not too many as strong as Red, or even Glinda… but plenty who can do well enough to be going on with. Bitty spells. Most only dabble.” He tugged out a cigarette and lit it with swift economy, as if casting them all away. “Off the hellmouth, most stick to cute, pretty things. Love spells and the like, and avoid the dark and the dangerous.” Pulled in a drag and exhaled sharply. “Where we were, of course, it turned toward the Dark Magicks like as not, but not everywhere’s the bloody _Boca del Infierno_ , innit?” He pointed with two fingers at Xander, still crouched and inspecting the metal plates. The glow of his cigarette lit his eyes where it stood up between them, like a sighting target. “The boy’ll be fine, with the limits he likely has, long as he keeps his head on his shoulders and remembers who he is.”

That was what worried Buffy. Would he remember?

Did he even know, anymore?

***

The armor turned out to be, essentially, big breastplate-things, tied on under the arms and over the shoulders into a kind of a ring at the back, because to be fair, Xander had neither the time to cut the stuff into dozens of tiny plates, nor anywhere to put them if he had. Vests with lots of tiny pockets were just not something they had laying around, so tactical vests were out. But Buffy was now making a mental note to go pick a few up at surplus stores for future reference, because she had basically had enough of lazy demons and pissy humans taking advantage of the fact that she and her Slayers fought footloose and fancy free, and using cheat-y methods like guns to take them out. /I mean, is that any honorable way to fight a supernatural warrior or fifty? Seriously!/ 

“Is it bad that I’m actually really kind of offended that the Scourge are going the whole ‘guns blazing’ route?” she demanded of Spike as he tied her thingie on.

“No, luv,” he answered, tugging on a small length of thin twine. “It’s bloody offensive. No self-respecting demon worth his salt would do it.” Another tug, this time from the other side, his irritated breath huffing chilly at her nape. “You’ll notice none of the blokes back in Sunnyhell ever tried it, and they all hated your guts. But they were honorable enough to come at you the old-fashioned way, yeah? Knew if they walked into any demon bar and started bragging they’d knocked off the Slayer with a bleedin’ rifle, they’d be laughed out, or even killed for it. Sure the bloody hell wouldn’t get any soddin’ credit for it.” A tug down over one shoulder, then the other. “No skill. Any ponce can pull a damn trigger. I could’ve done it, any day, was I brassed enough…”

“Almost did,” Buffy murmured to him; a quiet reminder. 

Silence, and one of his tugs after that was a bit too sharp. Self-flagellation, before he stilled. “Yeah, but that wasn’t for the glory. That was just personal pain, plain an’ simple. These gits… They don’t care about playin’ by the bleedin’ rules, do they? Just want you gone.”

“We’re not going to make it easy for ‘em,” she answered quietly.

“Never say die, luv. Never seen you oblige a demon yet.” Coming around to the front of her, he tugged a little at the thing currently digging into her shoulders. “Well, at least, none but one, and not when it came to a fight.” He shot her a halfhearted smirk, but mostly he was focused on the set of the armor. “There. Does that sit right, pet?”

He was trying so incredibly hard, despite the fact that he was terrified for her, so she took a deep breath to be sure she could. So far so good. No breathing restriction. The plate covered her major organs, for sure, and in swinging her arms, she found it at least didn’t restrict her movements. He’d gotten the ropes behind her shoulder blades. It pinched a hair, but it wasn’t cutting off her circulation, so she supposed she’d deal. “It’ll work.”

“Good.” His face twisted, and he turned away. “Like doing up a bloody corset, that was. Never thought I’d have to deal with all that rigmarole again…”

She caught his arm. “Spike…”

He swung back around, mouth smashing to hers. Held her hard against him by the upper arms, metal plate and all, crushing the unyielding thing between them. She gave in to the moment, thrust her fingers hard into his hair and just hung on, breathing into the overwhelming fear and the faint sliver of hope. It was always like this before a battle, but… 

So much more to lose now. So much more promise. Once, she had said to a man in her life, _“I’m sixteen years old. I don’t want to die.”_ Then, she had had no idea what waited, should she survive. Now… Now, she _knew_. And she _wanted_ it. In the last seven years she had come through fire and ice, heaven and hell… and she had learned that she wanted _life_. _This_ life, right here. /I _don’t_ want to die./

/I just want you./

“Don’t leave me,” he whispered when he let her go, and his forehead, pressed to hers, seemed colder than usual. Like she was taking everything with her. 

She folded her hands across her armored chest to pry his hands from her arms. Caught his fingers in hers. Wove them together. “Not planning on it.”

His voice was shaky, rough, as he pushed away, his eyes on hers fierce and uncompromising. “Holding you to that, Slayer.” And he scrubbed his already half-stripped, blunt fingernails into one palm. “Bloody hard, knowing you might be goin’ someplace I can’t follow.”

She felt the smile touch her lips, shook her head. “I wouldn’t put it past you to storm the gates. You’re a pretty determined guy.”

He shrugged and turned away. “Know the rules. They wouldn’t let me in.”

“I don’t know.” 

He whirled back around, thrust out the eye pencil he’d dug out from an inside pocket of his duster. “Here. Do me up, luv?”

She pulled in a deep breath. “Of course.” Nothing but the best for her most imperative rearguard, the person she had entrusted with her only remaining family since forever. Since long before there had been an 'us'.   
  
Accordingly, she nodded at her little travel bag, brought back from LA. “If you go in there, the nail polish is inside. You can fix those, too, while you’re waiting.” The midnight-blue-with-sparkles thing wasn't very fighty, after all, no matter how well he'd managed to wear it down in the last few hours.

The aside earned her a startled, if grateful look. “Thought we left it.”

She smiled as she drew closer to his eyes, pencil in hand. A mysterious smile, she hoped. “Would I do that?”

They headed down to join the rest of the assault team a few minutes later, Buffy feeling weirdly top-heavy and front-loaded as she adjusted her stride, working hard in the short time she had available to get used to the change in center of gravity, her new mass. It was weird to have every step feel like she was overbalancing, and she kind of wished they’d had enough metal around to at least make back-plates too, even though that would be twice as heavy. If they had, though, they would have ended up with half as many armored Slayers, which seemed like a bad plan. The wider front they could make of it, the better.

They exited the main doors to the courtyard, where they paused automatically to gauge the sunfall. Day had broken, which meant care had to be taken to keep Spike out of big-pile-of-dust territory… And, this really sucked, the whole having to head into a major fight without him. Both because they had gotten used to not having to worry about that limitation—had gotten used to heading into every fight together, as a unit, without question—and because he would be sitting back here losing his mind with worry over her. He wouldn’t even be able to go up on the wall and watch, because up there right now on the northeast wall there were no safe places for him. The sun was hitting it all along its length, every embrasure limned in new morning sunlight like it was gilded, the slayerettes on guard up there crouched behind each merlon like hunched statues, peering with one eye each through the crenels to keep an eye on Scourge movements. They were armed, every other one, with bows, to leave the more useful crossbows to the sortie party, and the tips of the bows broke the sunlight like they were on fire where they poked over the edges of the crenellations. 

It was still shady behind the merlons… but only until the sun rose high enough to overtop the battlement. Then, a vampire up top would be caught out with nowhere to go. The rays would expose every part of the eastern courtyard except for the base of the inside curtain wall. 

It was a deathtrap up there. 

The route to Dawn’s stable was still clear, of course. At this hour the entirety of the courtyard was in shadow, but it never hurt to be on one’s guard. Dawn waited for them near the clump of waiting soldiers, looking as anxious as Spike felt to Buffy’s blood-link with him, so with a quick, shared glance, they headed across the intervening space to join the party. When they reached the group, Satsu solemnly handed over the Scythe, eyes flicking from Buffy to Spike and back again; a wordless survey. Buffy merely nodded, accepting it, then turned back to her lover and held out the axe she’d used the entire time they’d fought side-by-side in Hell-A. “Do me a favor, Spike? Carry this for me while we’re out there?” 

His grin flickered. “Love to, pet.” And taking it from her, he held it out. Not an ounce of his earlier anxiety showed through in front of the troops, for which she was grateful. She could read it only in his eyes. “Ready?”

She tapped the outstretched blade lightly with the Scythe in their now-standard pre-battle toast. “As ever.” Tore her eyes from his to turn to Dawn. Her sister looked exhausted and worried, an emotion she was _not_ attempting to hide. She had stayed up all night, even after Spike and Buffy and the rest of the assault team had turned in for a quick, bracing power nap, apparently too anxious for anything so logical as sleep, and had instead volunteered to assist Xander with the task of muscling the large sheets of metal around while he cut them down to size and bent them into shape. “Hey. It’s gonna be fine.”

“Yeah,” Dawn answered, though clearly it was an answer couched in tired bravado.

Buffy moved closer. Caught her big-little sister’s hand. Tugged at it. Dawn sighed reluctantly and squatted to allow for a hug. Rigid, at first, and then finally relenting as she gave vent to her fears. “Don’t… let yourself get killed out there just because I have Spike to stay with me, now; okay?”

Was she really scared of that? “Hey. I’m so not planning on dying, alright Dawnie? I’ve got too much left to do and see in this world; with Spike _and_ with you.”

That seemed to fill her sister up with a vibrant kind of life she hadn’t felt in Dawn’s gangly frame in a long time. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she answered softly.

Dawn pulled back, and now her large face was beaming. “Okay.” 

God; she looked so damned _relieved_. “You just hang in there. This’ll be over soon, alright?”

“Okay.” 

Buffy turned away, eyes briefly touching on Spike’s. No need for words there. He just nodded slightly; a firm promise. 

Armed as she would ever be, Buffy started toward the group, to begin her pep talk. Give the last-minute orders. And was arrested by Dawn’s voice. “Hey, Buffy!”

She turned back. 

“Kick ass, okay?”

It brought a smile to her face. The delivery, filled with a younger sister’s hero-worship… And there was no bitterness in it. Buffy hadn’t heard that in a very long time. “I’ll do my best, Dawn.” And she turned back to the troops. Two units of them; three if you counted the ones on the walls, and everyone with their own part to play. “Okay, everyone; we all know what to do. Front rank; we’re keeping everyone else bullet-free. It’s gonna suck, but we can’t flinch. We’re counting on these…” She knocked on the metal plate on her chest with a set of knuckles, heard the hollow tap, and hoped like hell that their assault went quickly enough to keep the bullets aimed at center mass and not at anyone’s heads. “…And on the spell Daphne and Xander are working on to keep us hole-free till we get close enough to start grabbing guns. We shoot as soon as we get within range. When we reload, the rank behind us shoots. And et cetera. As many guns as possible go to the sides of the squad so they can guard our flanks when the fist starts to close. The rest goes to the second squad as they bring up the rear. Any questions?”

She was met with silent, tense faces, but nobody volunteered any queries.

Thank goodness for Gerta’s last-minute, mostly-theoretical, lecture on the use of automatic weapons, as Xan had been way too busy. The Swiss girl had been in the army down there, and knew her way around the more modern weapon; otherwise, they would all be screwed.

“Alright. Xander? Daphne? Are we ready?”

Xander didn’t even look up. He hadn’t had time to sleep since yesterday evening, before the gunfire had begun, and was looking stressed and more than a little haggard, what with the race to produce usable armor and now this whole studying a new spell thing. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that Daphne answered for them both and he remained head-down, muttering over the notebook they held between them, like a guy cramming for a last-minute pop-quiz. 

Buffy wondered when he had last eaten, and if he was running on anything but the memory of his last great victory, the ACME spell of metal-flattening. “We seem to be getting it,” Daphne informed the group quietly. “Or, rather, we’ve gotten it to cover about ten feet by three tall, once. Which will work, I suppose, if we carry it aboveground by a bit; bring it round everyone’s heads. Would rather it cover the whole lot, but better than nothing, I suppose. I doubt they’re likely to shoot at our feet.”

/Better if it was a little wider than ten feet/ Buffy thought grimly, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. The two non-witches were doing their best, and they all knew it. “Good work,” she said instead, and calmly formed the sortie into ranks according to that measurement; five women across the front, and then three armored slayerettes down each side before they started in on the un-armored ones. 

It would have to do. But, as wedges went, it was a pretty skinny one. 

“Okay, everyone. Set yourselves.”

She could feel Spike’s tension humming in the bond between them as she took her place in the center of the front rank, Scythe in hand, Nadira on one side of her and Tifenn on the other. She could not risk meeting his eyes or Dawn’s as she nodded once, firmly. “Alright, let’s head out.”  
  


As they approached the gates, the Slayers above in the gatehouse towers scrolled up the cage deal, the portcullis. They pulled the wide, oak doors ajar, and the first sortie group marched out in good order, while the second waited just behind them at the gatehouse. 

As the armored force exited it was clear that, at this southeast-facing angle they could not see the invaders. Not until they reached about the mid-point of the causeway, anyway. They marched out along the narrow bridge walking almost sideways so that they could position themselves with their armor facing to the east… and hopefully with the magickal shield also facing the correct direction as they stepped down the narrow bottleneck. That thing had been built to narrow the approach for enemies, but right now it was proving a disadvantage to the home team. 

It was unnerving to have one of their defensive weapons be invisible. Not that Buffy wanted the Scourge to be able to see it, but she wished at least _they_ could have. It would help with morale; to stuff down that creeping feeling of being terribly exposed as they marched off to their apparent doom. Because as they made it about halfway down the causeway they could see their enemies turning, slowly and as a unit, to witness the sortie; grinning to a demon with corpse-like, exposed teeth. This far away, with no projectile weapons of their own to reach that far, it just felt like signing one’s own death warrant to step out from the safety of the walls like this. 

Could a gun shoot this far? Accurately, anyway?

Well, at any rate, they weren’t shooting right now. The leader of the Scourge seemed to be settling, instead, on taunting as he watched them step off the causeway and resume their proper ranks. “So, Slayers. You come to meet your doom. Welcome. You see that there is no hope, and so you sally forth to meet us and kiss death on the lips. It is meet that you do this. Excellent, excellent…”

All around her, her sisters stirred at the thing’s smug tone. It was bridling, and Buffy felt a surge of triumph. /Just keep talking, Adolf. You couldn’t have said anything better if you wanted to sign your death warrant./ 

“Come, then. Come closer. Surrender and allow yourselves to be put down like the worthless half-breeds you are. You know you cannot win this fight. Let the pureblood army rule. Lay down your arms and open your gates. Look up on the faces of true demons, and not the useless mongrels you’ve hunted for all your days… and be grateful before you are destroyed that your death comes at the hands of the Pure.”

“Pleasant buggers, aren’t they?” Nadira muttered, tightening her grip on her crossbow.

“Oh, yeah, especially Adolf there.”

She snorted mirthlessly. “We should go shut him up.”

“Love to.”

Daybreak lit the grounds around the castle, limning the edges of the dry ditch as they marched around the long, wide curve from south to east and headed for the waiting Scourge, in good order and with a lot less trepidation than before. Above them, waiting on the walls, their sisters squatted behind the merlons, bows in hand. Behind them at the gatehouse, their relief waited, breathless and ready for the signal to dash out along the causeway and join the assault. /This has to work. It _has_ to./

As they got within what had to be weapons-range for the gun-toting savages, the gray-uniformed firing squad lifted their weapons to their shoulders. It was a motley assemblage of rifles; some of them newer-looking machine-guns with black stocks, some of them a lot older-looking, with brown, wooden stocks; some with those clip-things in them and some with what looked like the round, pulley-deal sticking out of the side. 

/I don’t know. I’m not good with guns. Give me an axe or a sword, any day./ It didn’t matter, in the long run, what kind of gun faced them down. It was all a long row of open-mouthed barrels, all pointing death right in their faces. It kind of made you want to pee yourself. But. Buffy had faced death often enough that something in her just went hard, looking at those tiny, gaping black mouths. Kept her feet stepping forward. She lifted the Scythe; a signal. /You can do this, Xander./

Her poor friend, her uncertain spellcaster-boy with his zero sleep since whatever he’d gleaned before the one-sided firefight… This was all on him. She prayed that he would he be able to hold up the shield, since they hadn’t forced him to try to do it at a distance. That would have for sure proved impossible for him, to keep him safe within the castle walls, though the fear of being hit by a bullet had to be distracting as well. Consequently he was the only interior person to be wearing one of the breastplates. It was a measure of his value, as well as a psychological tool. 

Daphne was muttering the spell alongside the young, newly-minted Watcher, their lips moving in unison. The Slayer-second would no doubt rather be in the fight proper, but at least she was down here at all rather than back inside the walls, by virtue of the need to get the spellcasters close enough to be within range. It would have killed the London Slayer to be left out of the assault. 

Hopefully she wouldn’t catch a bullet. That would kill her a lot faster.

When the command came to “Fire!”, it was almost lost in the resounding concussion of fifty weapons going off at once… and at length. They didn’t stop, once they’d started, and the resultant cacophony, this close to, was deafening, mind-numbing. Buffy had to admit she flinched, halted in the advance, waiting dumbly to see if she was dead. And watched, amazed, as the arcing, horizontal hail of bullets coming at them slowed abruptly right in front of their faces, as if they had hit an invisible wall of Jell-o. Stalled mid-air. Shuddered. And then penetrated, slowly, to pick up speed once more upon exiting.

It all happened so fast, in real-time, that the impact of the three or so which struck her in sternum, belly, and glancingly off to the left side, were all still a definite shock, and knocked the wind out of her for a second. But she was so busy just being amazed at the visual show of it that for a moment she couldn’t quite process what had happened. Her hand lifted of its own accord, while she fought to breathe; brushed over the divots in the metal now pressing hard against her flesh. They, too, would make it tough to breathe without pain. And she was bruised all over. But. She felt no sharp, pointy shrapnel-sensations. And…

/I’m alive./ 

It worked. It was working. /Oh my God, way to go _Xander!_ /

Sound came back first; the continued hail of bullets exploding from guns. The realization that it wasn’t going to stop. They were going to continue being hit, the shield would continue to take the brunt of the impact, dissipating the force of the deadly rain. They would hurt, and their breathing would be seriously curtailed with every impact, but they would not die. Still, the sooner they cut down on the number of shooters, the better for all of them. And they were going to have to do it while being fired upon, because with machine-guns and repeating rifles, there wasn’t going to be a break in the firestorm to give them time to aim. “Okay, ladies! We’re gonna have to get closer if we’re going to get our own shots in!”

Her voice, heard somehow over the pitch of roaring gunfire, broke the awed stasis of the front line, and somehow the well-trained leadership of the Slayer Organization kicked themselves into motion, began marching forward. The invisible shield pushed on ahead of them, held by a grimly-determined human holding his concentration by little more than tooth-bared determination and sheer force of will. If he faltered, they all died. It was a lot of pressure, and she was kind of awed right now that he was holding up to the task; and okay, maybe Spike had something about her feelings for Xander. Right now, for maybe the first time in her life, she was kind of finding him bizarrely attractive. But that was a thought for another day, because right now, fighting to stay alive was the thing, and it was probably just making her insane. 

The crazed push in the face of overwhelming, bullet-riddled odds continued unabated, while the Scourge demons fired and reloaded and bared their fleshless teeth and… backed up a step, beginning to look anxious. Began to let out little roars and screams of frustration as the advancing Slayers refused to just lay down and die. “You are as nothing!” Adolf was shrieking over the endless, numbing popping of the guns. “You are worthless! You will all fail!”

He sounded like a paid preacher on an infomercial, or some crazy guy on a street corner. Buffy didn’t even bother to listen anymore. They were in range, now. “Crossbows!”

The front line halted. The five front women lifted their weapons to their shoulders, Buffy stabbing the Scythe briefly to earth to bring her own to bear. The three armored ones to each side snapped outward, bringing eleven of the weapons into play in total.

“Fire!”

They did so, and the three flanking women on each side immediately stepped back into ranks to get back behind the shield while the bolts shot through at full speed. 

Luckily, their spelled shield was one-way. Hence, as they maneuvered, eleven members of the Scourge’s front row of combatants keeled over backward. 

“Fire!” Buffy called again, dropping. And while the Scourge halted their firing order in confusion, the front rank of Slayers knelt, and the row behind fired their crossbows over their heads to take out another five.

Her front row had been hurriedly reloading while they knelt, and rose smoothly back in front of the unarmored women before the Scourge could recover. Fired again, this time without awaiting her word. Knelt. And the rear group, who had reloaded in the interim, fired in turn. Thirty-two Scourge demons down in the first assault. While the Slayers, so far, had lost no one. 

The Scourge were roiling. The neat hail of bullets had fallen into a ragged, sporadic dotting, without any discipline. Adolf was screaming imprecations at them, bellowing at them to reform the line, resume shooting, what was wrong with them, it was just a bunch of mongrel females, why were they letting half-breed Slayers stop them… 

Apparently none of them had ever thought that part-human, part-demon combatants could ever take them by surprise. God, hadn’t anyone ever tried to fight back against them before, or had everyone just tucked tail and run away?

Were they really even that dangerous, or was it just that they were so used to intimidating everyone that they had never really had to fight? Did they even have any idea _how_ to? None of them had even tried to change firing patterns to shoot for the head, once the whole aiming for the body thing had proven ineffectual. 

Not that Buffy was sad about that. “Pattern Alpha!” she bellowed, because it was time to take advantage of the confusion. None better would come.

And she swept downward with the Scythe. 

The front line dropped their crossbows for the rearguard to pick up, and raged forward to attack.

Then it was all familiar knife-work for a change; all rhythm and blows, and at first it was easy. These idiots hadn’t even thought to carry melee weapons, they had been so confident that they would account for their quarry with just the guns. They tried to swing with the heavy stocks, of course, to brain their attackers, but that kind of thing wouldn’t get anywhere near a Slayer, so all that earned them was a stab in what passed for a heart or a lost head. Very quickly the first ranks of the gross, uniformed demons fell, their organized chaos turning swiftly to just… chaos. But…

This was where it got sensitive, because Buffy and her team had, by virtue of the size of the shield, only so many people in their force. Five by five was a tiny fist to use to punch into such a massive bunch of invaders. There had to be a hundred demons here; enough that as the Scourge recovered from the initial shock of their lines meeting, the rear of their force lifted their weapons to bear. Which meant that Buffy’s force couldn’t spread out beyond the confines of their protective shield to maximize the size of their front, make it twenty-five wide. Which meant that eventually, they were going to be outflanked. The further they penetrated into the heart of the invasion force, the more they were going to become like a fist stuck inside a loose, gooey cadaver… and eventually the much larger demon army was going to fold around them from the sides like a set of jaws and clamp down. And then their teeth made of bullets would mow the Slayers down from the sides, where they had neither shields nor armor, and grind them between their two arms like a meat process in the grinder at the DMP.

“Pattern Beta!” Buffy called, and waved the Scythe over her head. They had such a narrow window here…

Gunfire started, coming now from her own people, who had picked up as many rifles as they could scrounge from Scourge corpses to arm the flanks of their force. This sound was both signal and coverage for their second unit as it pounded up from the causeway to take up the rear of the charge. They would still have to remain five-broad, and the whole length of each side would remain incredibly exposed, but as long as the front line continued to do its job of keeping the main line of the Scourge occupied, and the sides of the force continued to pick up guns to cover themselves, hopefully they would manage to keep enough bullets off the fist of the Slayer advance to keep at least the larger portion of their force alive until they could do away with the majority of the invaders. 

/Two to one is a hell of a lot better odds than four on one!/ Thank God at least a few of the younger Slayers had known a little bit about shooting; a hell of a lot more than Buffy had ever known. Last night’s crash-course had been a helpful addendum, considering most Slayers learned nothing of that particular weapon. It was saving them time and lives now, what with all the business of safeties and aiming and stuff. 

Buffy didn’t bother to pick one up for herself. She knew better. Those things? Never useful. 

Besides; she had the Scythe. Weapon of choice. It almost made up for how incredibly naked her back felt right now; and not because of the missing armor there.

She badly missed Spike as she went on with the business of it. _Swing, parry, duck, dodge, strike…_ The clock of her life, but she was barely moving, her advance stilled, her left side feeling horribly exposed without him. Nadira was at least five paces away at this point, fighting her own desperate fight. The ranks of Scourge demons went who knew how many deep, the ones at the back lifting their guns under their leader’s exhortations and planning to fire once more. This time they would no doubt aim for heads rather than bodies, and the best the Slayers could do would be to pray the bastards had poor aim. And crap; none of them were facing forward anymore, which kind of rendered the armor useless even if the assholes aimed for the body. “Firing! Rank up!” 

The front line heard her somehow and swung around to present their breastplates to the front, though doing so cost Tifenn a bad duck… and she went down. And, oh, God, was she dead? They couldn’t afford the gap in the line, couldn’t afford…

Someone behind her rushed up, whispered something to Tifenn. She whispered something back. And then the armor was being sliced off, slung over a head, to dangle loosely over another woman’s neck, and Buffy vaguely recognized one of the other Brittany girls taking her leader’s place in the front line, a sword held fiercely in a left-handed grip and teeth bared. 

/God./

The new hail of bullets struck like a whole flurry of tiny fists. Closer-range really hurt a lot worse; and this time there was that spalling thing Xander talked about. The impact drove Buffy almost to her knees, to the accompaniment of a sharp stabbing as of a thousand tiny needles spraying her in her neck, jaw, and right cheek; but there was no time for that. Not safe, when the people behind them were counting on them to be human shields. She choked for breath and hung on for dear life, leaning hard on the Scythe planted deep in the ground, just glad that she didn’t have to use it to fight someone at the same time and kind of impressed that these bastards were so venal. They hadn’t even given their own people time to get out of the way before firing. Two Scourge guys had gone down in the storm, spinning lifelessly around inside the rain of bullets. /Two less to come at us full-tilt, two less demons for us to fight./

She thought she saw one of the girls from the left flank spin, fall, head jerking back. One of the bastards had gotten lucky in his aim. /Oh God…/

She was so _tired_. And she just wanted to breathe.

They couldn’t afford to lose anyone. And the problem was, they hadn’t taken down enough enemy combatants. That had been the goal… but there was still about half the Scourge army back there under the trees, at the edge of the lake; firing at them, untouched and reassembled into something like discipline. Adolf stalked along behind them, barking orders, while the gray-suited troops stood firm, teeth bared and growling and apparently ready to take the Slayer army a lot more seriously than they had before. 

/Guess we surprised them, at least./ 

The problem was, now they were pinned down. And, unfortunately, Buffy had already committed everyone. Which mean twice as many, now, to die when the trap closed. 

They had talked about trying to break the front of the shield to wrap it around the sides once they got into the demon ranks, since close-combat meant the use of the machine guns would be less likely once they got into hand-to-hand, but obviously there were still the ranks behind to worry about. Hence the problem. /God, Daphne, I wish you’d brought your sister along. She’d be a help right now./ 

The thing was, Xander was doing amazingly for a person who wasn’t really a witch at all. It was honestly incredible he’d kept his concentration for this long, with bullets flying around and people being shot. But he could only be expected to do so much, could only extend the shield so far before he’d lose it, no matter how Playskool the spell. Inescapably, this was going to happen, if they couldn’t capitalize on their assault and gain a decisive victory within the first minutes. Inevitably the much broader front of the Scourge had begun to fold up around them like punishing jaws. She could hear the desperate firing from the girls on the sides, the panicked notes in the shouting there. 

It was the beginning of the end. They were going to be enveloped. Crushed. Their rearguard relief had no armor, no long-reaching weapons. As the first ranks had brought all the available crossbows, that was it for self-saving weaponry. Yes, the defenders had managed to pick up some guns, had tried to leave some behind them, and clearly from the noise of it the side troops were employing them to good effect… but soon it wouldn’t be enough. 

Soon, no matter what Buffy and the front line did, the angle of advance would come right for the Scourge flanks to close with the Slayer flank. They would be able to bring their own weapons to bear… and then they would mow all the girls down from both the left and the right, and it would be over.

And, of course, by now it was probably way too damn late to retreat. They were committed too deep into the center. She could try to get the second squad to back out, at least, get the bows on the walls to cover them if they were pursued… but in doing so they’d only be mowed down from behind, along with any who exposed themselves through the crenellations of the castle to cover the rout. And anyway, if this didn’t work it wasn’t like the Scourge weren’t just going to get in eventually and kill them all one way or the other.

It had always been a gamble. It had just not paid off. 

She thought of Spike’s eyes. Of Dawn, as the realization hit. Prayed they could last in there at least till nightfall, so he could get her out of there. Get her somewhere safe in the world. Somewhere _not_ with the Slayer Organization. Not now. /Don’t dust yourself, Spike, when you feel me… go. She needs you, just like last time. We didn’t do enough damage. Not nearly enough… and you need to keep going. For Dawn. I’m sorry./ They were going to fail. They were going to die here. And the Scourge was going to move on; to the next cell, and the next, and the next, until all the Slayers were dead, or until their numbers were finally whittled down enough that at least one cell remained standing to call it a victory. And each time they attacked, they’d come up with another plan, and another…

She was shocked out of her anguished reverie when a sudden shriek caused a break in the gunfire. A shriek from a demon; a gurgling thing… and Buffy saw a gray-uniformed figure fly over their heads, smack into a tree. Slide down it like a cartoon-character, to land on the ground beside the pond with a loose, sickening _thunk_. Before she even had time to register what was going on another one followed him, slung backward with such vicious force that he flew halfway back toward the dry, rainwater-filled ditch that surrounded the castle, where he vanished utterly. And screamed, though it was quickly cut off as a bowshot from the walls ended him. 

And then, out of nowhere, all of the Scourge had their attention turned away from the trapped contingent of half-armored Slayers, and were staring back toward the path toward the castle gate, looking as stunned as anything could who had half a face. 

“Form ranks!” the leader bellowed, and all of the group that had been collapsing around the Slayer-y fist swiveled suddenly away to bunch up and face the same direction; sort of back where they had come from on the left side of the assault force, and pooling mostly on the right. 

Buffy swiveled to follow their gaze… and was pretty sure she screamed. 

_Dawn_ was on the field. Wearing a bunch of corrugated tin armor, and throwing Scourge guys into their buddies like she thought being a giant made her immortal or something. “DAWN, what are you _doing?”_

And then she heard Spike swearing sulfurously next to her, in the uncertain shade of the trees and in full-on game face. He had a massive, crackling burn across his vamped-out forehead, another high on one cheekbone and spreading, and both sets of knuckles were charred black, and his boots were smoking; and _where_ had Spike come from, _how_ had he… 

“Spike?” What was even going on…

A gun stock swung down, toward the blond head. He deflected it with a snarl, swung his axe as if he had no time to even spare a glance at the demon in his way. Lopped off a head, eyes staring in horror at their giant child as she rampaged around like an idiot throwing demons around, and…

“She’s gonna get herself bloody killed!”

He was trailing smoke like a meteor, going all ashy around the edges from sun-exposure, and he was right. He had followed Dawn out from the castle somehow, because she was being an insane, noble moron, and Buffy had to stop this before Spike tore ass out into the daylight to save their idiot kid and she lost them both.

She was running for Xander faster than she had ever run before in her life, screaming. Caught him by the shoulder and turned him so that he could see what was happening. “There! Shield. On Dawn! Now!”

“I c… I’ll lose it if I…” Xander’s eye went wide and terrified as he watched the developing insanity. 

“You _can!”_ Buffy shouted, tears starting in her eyes. “I _believe_ in you, Xander!”

“Oh God…”

There was a hangman’s pause that probably lasted about a tenth of a second. It was the longest ever in Buffy’s life… at least since Glory’s tower, between blood drops, or that instant she had reached out for Spike’s glowing, burning hand. 

And then, behind them, the Scourge opened fire.

Xander’s one eye was anguished, and he was moaning over and over again, “I tried, I don’t know, I don’t…”

But then Dawn, staggering backward under the onslaught of probably hundreds of bullets, shook herself. Made a pissed-off face, and said, very loudly, “Ow! That _hurt!”_

The outraged tone was just enough to make Buffy, now completely overwrought, burst into something that felt like hysterical laughter. She grabbed Xander by the shoulders and kissed him hard and soundly, right on the mouth, and was running again, back toward the front before he could even register what had happened. Behind her she thought she heard him say to Daphne, awed, “Did I do it? I think I did it!”

The shield would stay on Dawn, and to hell with the rest of them. They were scattered anyway, and SOL. On their own. At least the stunned Scourge line was a broken-up mess as her insane giant sister rampaged into them, shrieking about how no one got to hurt her sister and her Spike, and how the Scourge were stupid, ugly demons anyway, and how they were polluting her bathtub, or something, and, just, god; if any of them aimed at her head instead of her chest…

They had to end this and they had to end it quick. Here, before all the unshielded casualties mounted up, and…

Back in the shade of the trees, a thoroughly sunburnt Spike was grappling with a confused Scourge guy. The latter was, of course, snarling at him and saying insulting things about vampires. She closed with the grody jerk, caught the tail end of the conversation, “… Foul odor of your human soul like a plague, scenting the air all around you with the taint of love and…”

“I think he’s pretty,” Buffy quipped, and lopped off the gross head. “Unlike some demons. Spike, I don’t know how you got out here, but for God’s sake stay out of the sun, what if they get her? I can’t lose _both_ of you!” She was shaking all over as she stared around her for something to kill, but all the closest Scourge were at least ten, fifteen feet away. 

“Tell you later.” Fierce amber eyes caught hers, hard and fast under crispified brows. “Don’t you bloody give up on me, Slayer. Let’s finish this.”

She pulled in a deep, steadying breath and nodded, squaring her shoulders. “I want Adolf.” She cast about her, seeking the bastard out. “Where the hell did he go?”

Spike’s incisive vamp-gaze found the leader first, and he pointed with his axe. “There in that copse. Right bastard, hiding by the lake, directing his troops and keepin’ his hands clean.”

Buffy squinted. How anyone could tell the jerks apart at a distance was beyond her. They all looked just various kinds of nasty, really. “You sure?”

“Can tell it’s him by the collar tabs.”

She would take his word for it. “Alright.” She started forward, stalking determinedly. Lopped off another head when it hove into view, saw Spike, as he fell in automatically at her left, knock off an arm and casually swipe through a throat. “If you get so much as one more burn from a gap in the trees, I’ll kill you.”

“Wasn’t going to let her dash off like that without me, was I?” he pointed out grimly, clearly bubbling with repressed ire. “Damn Bit’s a chip off the Buffy block. Did you know she had an ulterior motive, helpin’ Harris?”

Buffy set her lips in a firm line, but didn’t comment. She’d kill Dawn for that later. Making giant-y armor for herself when no one was looking, out of _roof_ -stuff, of all things, as if that was strong enough… and just… jeez. She was lucky she hadn’t _died!_

Insane, brave Summers. Brave as any Slayer. 

Buffy would be proud tomorrow. Right now she’d settle on ‘alive’. 

They reached Adolf, found him distracted. He was so busy watching his troops being demoralized and decimated by a giant girl and a bunch of half-breed humans that he didn’t notice their approach till they were right on him. So much for predatory pure-breed instincts. “Hey! Demon Hitler!”

The Scourge leader swung around to glare at them, looking amazed that anyone of their ilk would dare come so close. Like, right in his face. “Begone, foul creature; you and your vampire pet! You stink of souls and human detritus…”

“Yeah. About that!” She shoved the pointy end of the Scythe right under his jaw. Turned it hard. “How does it feel, Mr. Purebred, to know you’re going to lose all your people and die at the hands of a couple of tough mutts and a human with a giant-spell on her?”

The demon ignored the slice to sneer proudly at her threat, his rotten half-face smelling of dead flesh, his exposed teeth like a corpse’s. “I will know that this dimension has been bereft too long of the righteous glory of the Old and Pure.” Cutting into his throat was so not shutting him up. Maybe if she sliced deeper… “That when they return we shall rise again…”

“Oh, spare me,” Spike muttered, coming up from behind him, and caught the nasty, leathery head in his arms. “Met one of your Old Ones. She’s decided being human’s better. What does that tell you about all your demonic glory?” And, grinning viciously, he twisted the Adolf’s head while Buffy finished her deep stabbing cut into the thing’s throat… until it popped clean off. 

Spike made a disgusted face and dropped the dripping skull to the ground before the thick, black blood and ragged, veiny stuff could get all over his boots, lifted his eyes to meet Buffy’s. “Teamwork, yeah?”

_“Thank_ you,” she groaned in answer, and planted the head of the Scythe heavily in the ground. Leaned hard on the handle to catch her breath. “God, I thought he would never shut up.” She lifted the thing a little to poke at the body on the ground. “You know, this is going to be a hell of a mess to clean up. I know this is a worn-out rant, but why can’t every demon just dust nicely away like you vamps? It’s just so much more _polite_.”

Spike grinned till it cracked the burn on his insane cheek, fangs out and exhilarated. “Not everyone can be superior, like us.” He gave a little bow, turned it into a stoop to pick up the borrowed axe. “Service with a smile.” Standing as he was in shifting dapples of occasional sunlight, his back was still smoking slightly under the duster, dammit.

He was so very lucky she was too damn numb and exhausted to deck his idiot ass for being insane and trying to get himself burned up again on her.  
  
With a heavy sigh, she looked around… and felt her cresting surge of adrenaline drop away as her survey revealed that the front had pretty much utterly dissipated. All that was left really were little scattered clumps of fighters; a demon fighting two Slayers here, two demons fighting one Slayer there, Dawn slamming a couple of demons together midair and flinging them down…

It helped to win the melee portion of things when your enemy had forgotten to provide for that part of the fight with any actual weapons. It made their battle plan kind of one-dimensional. 

God, it was actually over. 

Giving up, Buffy sat down on a nearby hunk of granite. In the shade, thank you very much, so that her guy could stop turning very slowly into goddamned barbecue. Fumbled behind herself in an attempt to remove the godawful, dented breastplate digging into her chest. So many bruises, so hard to breathe. “I really don’t want to thank Dawn for this. The little idiot risked her life, and yours. But she saved all our butts, too.”

Spike took the hint, moved into the solid block of shade to squat next to her. Very helpfully worked the smallest, pointed blade of the axe up under the rough bindings he had so painstakingly tied an hour ago to slice the breastplate off of her. It fell to the ground with a dull clang, and the _relief_ of it was just… phenomenal. “Yeah, she did. Impulsive chits, you Summers girls. But brave as hell.”

Hissing at her bruises Buffy swung on him, unsure whether to hit him or just give it up. “How the hell did _you_ get out here, anyway?” He couldn’t have stopped Dawn, but to risk his own life trying was the height of dumbassery, even for Spike. Promise or no promise…

But she knew him. With both of his girls out here he would rather have dusted than stay behind, safe in the shade of the castle and unable even to witness the outcome. She couldn’t fault him for that. 

At least, not now he’d somehow survived it.

“Saw the Bit bolt. Couldn’t follow her out the front, so I grabbed up a hank of tarpaulin from the top of one of the supply dumps and dashed through the bleedin’ castle. Ran out the sally port faster than I’ve ever run in my long sodding unlife. Found every shadow I could and galloped through the bleedin’ sun to the trees here prayin’ I wouldn’t go up in flames. That bloody little chit will be the death of me…”

“Oh my God, please don’t say that!” The ground shook a little; the thudding noise of a heavy footfall, and Dawn was there, crouching to get down to their level. Her face was blanched, though there were spots of color on each cheek and she was sweating from exertion. “You so didn’t need to follow me!”

Buffy shook her head wearily and leaned back on her palms. “Shut up, Dawn. You are way beyond grounded.”

“But it worked, right? You guys were about to lose. And I helped!”

Xander wandered over to join them, flopped down heavily to land beside Buffy. And stared up at Dawn, expression astonished. “Dawnie, you were amazing. And so, so stupid.” He snorted wearily. “Remind me of me, you big Scoobie, you.”

“What about you, you amazing witch-guy?” Dawn answered all admiringly. “And you wonder why I spent years being all crushy on you.”

Xander blinked his single eye, like a half-blind owl. “You what, now?”

Spike scoffed so hard a fine dusting of ash floated away from his cheek to flit away on the light breeze. Buffy's stomach turned over, threatened to empty itself. “B’lieve she does that to unsettle us blokes, Harris. Keep us on our toes. Pay it no mind. Highly doubt she could have a crush on you _and_ me. We’re too bloody different.”

“Shows how much _you_ know,” Dawn answered smugly, and squinted out into the sun. “Wow. This is cool. My first big battle. And I helped _win_ it.”

“Settle down there, turbo,” Buffy warned grimly. /Have you even _looked_ at Spike? I mean, granted, yeah, you can't be responsible for his actions, but.../ She wanted to bury her face in her hands, because her damn stupid, insane sister had saved them all, and _look_ at Spike, and, just... Dammit.  
  
The adrenaline dump, and the leftover panic combined together was making her hands shake, making her gorge do a tango in her throat, and it was all kinds of ungood. It really made her want to snap at someone, something. “First and _last_ , so don’t let it go to your head,” she managed finally, on a slow, controlled breath, because Dawn-management was a learned skill.

“Aw, _man_ …”

_“Last,”_ Buffy insisted flatly, and tamped down on the wild flare of rage with an effort. “If you’re going to let this whole giant thing go to your head and make you think you’re some kind of immortal superhero, then clearly our first priority is to get you shrunk before you do something else of the majorly-stupid.”

“Oh, c’mon, Buffy! This is my first chance to be special; like you! It’s totally worth a few inconveniences! I mean, think about it! How often do you think you could use someone who could practically step on your enemies and crush them to death…”

_“No,_ Dawn.”

She pouted, crossing her huge arms. “This is so not fair. Xander gets to be all witchy all the sudden, but nooo. I don’t even get to stay giant-girl…”

“Woah, woah; hold up. This witch-thing was just a one-off. Just because I was needed. I’m not really… You know?”

No one really answered Xander’s disturbed comment, and after a sec he groaned and laid back on the trampled grass, threw his arm up over his eye. “You think this isn’t something I can just forget about, or take back, right?”

“It’s gonna keep you up nights, Harris. Probably have a few wet dreams about it. Fact, were I you, I’d get on the horn with Red right now and start talkin’.”

“Oh God,” Xander groaned, sounding overwrought. “Wil’s gonna kill me.”

“See? Why does he get to keep playing with magicks, but I have to go back to…”

Buffy shoved herself to her feet, because might as well put the shaky to use instead of just laying around feeling like she was about to vomit. “Because you can’t even fit in the _door,_ and this is not a discussion. Now c’mon. You wanna make yourself useful? Help us clean up the place.”

“Oh, man…” Clearly being put on garbage-detail wasn’t exactly high on Dawn’s list of rewards for being all heroic.

Buffy flicked her gaze to Spike, exchanged a look with him that was equal parts amused and full of recognition for the anxiety his current state was causing in her. She watched then as his expression turned rueful. “Love to help, pet, but I think I’m stuck here for a bit.”

“Yeah, well, when the sun moves, you’re toast," Buffy managed, roughly. "I’ll get someone to bring you a blanket. Get out of here. That’s an order.”

He gave an easy little nod and flapped one hand on his knee. “Yes ma’am.”

From the ground, Xander rolled his one eye. “God, that’s sickening. I don’t even wanna know, you know?”

Spike dismissed him with another scoff. “As if you didn’t ask how high when your bird told you to jump, Harris.”

“Okay, but…” Xander’s mouth clamped shut, an admixture of pain, longing, and old amusement sliding across his lined features. “Okay, that’s fair.” With a sigh, he pushed himself heavily to his feet. “I’ll go find you a blanket.”

Spike’s expression began at startled, edged swiftly toward grateful around all the torched. “Ta, mate.”

“Can’t have you going up in a cloud of dust. I’d have two Summers girls after me.” Xander's voice turned darkly amused. “Never a good plan.”

“Yeah. Bloody terrifying, Summers women.”

“Don’t I know it.” 

Shaking her head, Buffy tugged at the rope securing Dawn’s dented, makeshift armor to her shoulder. “C’mon. Make yourself useful.”

With an extremely put-upon sigh, Dawn pushed herself to her giant feet and followed Buffy back out into the sun.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
So, yeah... was gonna try to break that up a bit into smaller chapters, but it just didn't have a good spot for it. So... you got it all in one chunk, for better or worse.  
  
Hope the demise of the Scourge works for y'all. It ends up being important beyond the current moment.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some heavy stuff here... and some decisions that are a long time in the making.  
> And... dammit... I couldn't figure out, thematically, where to split this either. So... here's another long-ass chapter to start off a new 'section'.

_“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”_

* * *

For lack of any better plan, they ended up throwing all the demon bodies into the dry moat. The things lined the ditch two-deep by the end, and they dispatched two of the uninjured girls from the wall to head into Glasgow with the Organization’s one battered ‘lorry’ to pick up a huge load of quick-lime to use to dissolve the bastards. (Coat them and seal them? Turn them into weird statues, like in those pictures of that town under that volcano in Italy? The one that sounded like pom-poms, ish.)   
  
Luckily, the stuff was commonly used to make concrete, so it could be easily explained away in their role as ‘restorationists’. Also, technically, if they wanted the stupid moat to actually hold water someday, then according to Xander, this was the way to go. Which, maybe, also meant the stuff might help keep the bodies from contaminating the groundwater, since their quick Internet search told them lime was also sometimes used to treat groundwater for sewage, nitrogen, acids, and other waste products.

Useful stuff, lime. 

It didn't take long to get the bodies safely out of sight under a very thin coating of lime, dirt, and rubble. While a disproportionately large team of weary young Slayers worked at shoveling crap over the top of the corpses, another put the castle to rights (or, as well as they could, anyway, considering they were pretty crappy restorationists, letting a bunch of jerks come shoot a whole barrage of bullets into the walls). Meanwhile, a third, smaller troupe tended to the injured.   
  
Checking in on casualties was always Buffy’s least-favorite part of any battle, but it was a necessary duty. Especially when it was going to be a rough one; when there were for sure going to be dead and dying girls involved, and some of them people she knew well, had worked with for a long time. 

Tifenn was not going to make it. Greta, their medic, let Buffy know that right away, with her quick head-shake. Tifenn knew it too, the way her eyes focused steadily on Buffy’s, despite the pain in them. “My cell. Make sure… they’re taken care of?”

/Dammit./ “Of course.” 

On the other side of the dying woman, her second, Privela, watched in silence, her face numb and drawn but determined as Buffy squeezed the chilly hand.   
  
And moved on to the next... and the next. Four dead, total. Clarissa from London, Rhonda and Mary from Scotland, and Paulette from Brittany. Seven injured badly. Claudia and Solenn of the Brittany group, Sophia and Ella from here in the Scotland HQ, and Lea and Brooke from the London cell, along with the recently-located Theresa, who had finally been found lying behind the wall where she had fallen over the side after the firefight, to lie on the verge of the ditch till morning.

She would no doubt die in the night, along with Ella and Leah. On top of that there were six other girls with pretty bad injuries, and about twenty with minor but survivable wounds. 

Yes, it could have been worse. Obviously without Xander and Daphne it would have been. Or, hell, without Dawn, though Buffy didn’t exactly want to admit that to her heroic, insane sister. So she went to Xan, who having made his own exhausted rounds of the infirmary was now sitting in the dining hall over a cup of coffee, staring sightlessly at the table next to Daphne and Nadira, a clearly hero-worshipping Renee seated next to him with one arm slung over his drooping shoulders. And, well. Far from shrinking from the girl, he looked to be shyly enjoying the attention as Renee talked him up. So, okay. That was fine, then. Maybe this magicks thing had even pulled him out of his shell, a little.

Still. Note to self to call Willow, just as soon as she could stay awake long enough to organize her thoughts. “Hey. I just wanted to tell you both… amazing job. You went above and beyond. It was honestly incredible, especially since I know you were put completely on the spot. No one could have imagined you doing better. You saved everyone’s lives. You should be extremely proud.”

Nadira grabbed Daphne’s shoulders and squeezed them. Shook her tired friend. “Oi. Hear that? Told you. Call your sister, yeah? Tell her what you did!”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Xander, though, had lifted his eyes from his contemplation of his glass to watch Buffy with a small smile, expression filled with a new, confused sort of confidence. “It’s really weird. But… thanks, Buffster.”

 _“See?”_ Renee prodded, smiling proudly. 

Xander shrugged modestly at that, but Buffy could tell he was blushing at the feminine attention. “Yeah, well.”

She would leave them to it. 

Forcing herself to grab something to eat, Buffy carried the sandwich and coffee with her as she wandered back to the infirmary… mostly because she couldn’t stop herself. It was hard to watch, of course, but she felt she owed it to them. To stand by, if she couldn’t sit with any of them. They had their own leaders… and even when it was her own people, it wasn’t really her they wanted at their sides. She talked to each of them briefly, of course; but they had others, closer to them, to stand the long watches. She had remained too emotionally distant from everyone, here, for that kind of connection, had taken all the away-missions, made sure she wasn’t here with them a lot… And now, of course, they were doubly unsure about her, because of Spike.

She wasn’t theirs anymore, if she ever had been. They trusted her as a battle-leader, because they knew what she was, what she had seen. Because they trusted her experience. Trusted her to get them out alive. But that was it. They didn’t _know_ her. 

This wasn’t Sunnydale. It never would be; or even Hell-A. And these girls weren’t the Scoobies, or the Spikettes… or even the Potentials.

They were an army. She had been little more than a commander. She’d told them to jump, for months, and they’d obeyed. They’d been in actions together… but they had not become close. None but her few seconds. And even with them… she had held herself in reserve, because to come close would mean losing them, and she had had enough of losing people.

She had let herself come close, a short time ago, in spite of herself; to Gris, to Rinne, to Maria and Groo and Lorne and the rest. It had crept up on her. And when it had happened—the inevitable loss—it had been like red hot agony, to feel that, all over again. Now…

A few steps inside the room, Tifenn was breathing her last, with two of her Slayers there, holding her hands. The girl who had put on her armor to carry the charge, and Privela, who would take up her mantle when she died. A totally different scenario, but all Buffy could see was Griselda, back in Hell-A, and Rinne, holding her hand while she...

Spike was there, of course, behind her in the doorway. The solid bulwark she had always needed when she desperately required something to put her back against. And when the next breath didn’t come… “William… take me away from here?”

He caught her hand, drew her away from the infirmary, down the hall. And up to their room.

***

The next few days were difficult in their own way. There were personal tensions, swiftly turned outward. Primary among them had been a small but spirited debate, carried on mostly in sharp glances, when Spike had risen from bed the evening following the battle, just as Buffy had come to rejoin him there. While she watched him in surprise he’d moved to crack the door and peer out into the corridor, judging the faint hint of fading sunlight tinting the stone floor with a blood-red stripe from the arrow-slit about fifty feet along the way, then turned back to her with a shrug and said, “Well, I’m off, Love. Got to make my way back into the city, innit? Get to the back door of the hospital before all the rest, beat the rush…”

“You _what?”_ she’d demanded, horrified at the matter-of-fact tone of voice with which he had delivered his pronouncement.

He hadn’t met her eyes, contenting himself instead with tugging out his wallet. “Got any dosh to spare, though, Slayer? No knowing what the going rate is, here.”

“Spike, what…”

He’d lifted his eyes to hers, uncompromising azure lasers. “Still running a bit spare, Buffy, since that business on the wall.”

As if to highlight his reasoning in bright, fluorescent exclamation points, the still- (and very slowly) healing burns on his face showed up in terrible relief in the oddly vivid light from outside their bedroom door; like a crackle-painting on one of those weird field trips Buffy’s freshmen class had taken from Hemery to the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown LA. ‘Vampire, a la Crispee’ (ashes on flesh in blood and oil, 2004).  
  
She’d commenced trembling on the inside, abruptly faced with reality this side of the mirror. “I can give you more…”

He had been immovable on that point. She hadn’t needed the words, had read the answer in his eyes. He’d given them to her anyway. “It’s too soon, pet, and you know it. Maybe if I hadn’t lost so sodding much we’d manage that way for a bit longer, but you and I both know I need to top off. Get a good base back to start off with. If I get too lean again, like I was in Hell-A…”

Buffy had bitten the inside of her cheek and torn her eyes away, because she knew better than anyone that constant race against starvation; knew moreover, how it had affected him. The ever-present, low-level nagging of it. The tension in his body, the niggling stress of it behind everything. /I don’t want that for him. And he has to heal./ With the double whammy of bullets rolling around inside him, and now these damn burns…

They could deal with logistics later. They didn’t have the time now. 

Knowing it had forced her to give in. “Okay,” she’d whispered. “Dammit.” And, pushing herself to her feet, she’d ripped open the top drawer of her small dresser, rummaged in the back for the emergency fund she kept there for whenever she’d had to bail quickly for some away-mission. “Here." Shoved the wad of pound-notes into his hands. "Just…” 

There _had_ to be a better way, right?

He’d taken the brightly-colored cash, forefinger brushing hers. Bent, kissed her cheek. “Back soonest, pet.”

She’d caught his lapels as he’d turned away, pulled him in close. “Take one of the cars. Down behind the building. And bring it back here. If you’re not too hungry. So you can heat it up. Don’t… drink it cold from the bag like some kind of barbarian.” She’d forced her eyes up to meet his, hating this; hating all of it. “That’ll at least make it a little better, right?”

He’d nodded, forehead just a breath from hers, and smiled slightly, because he’d known as well as she had that it would probably cause a fuss, with all the slayerettes downstairs in the commissary, and him heating up his blood in the public microwave, in one of the public-use mugs. But the girls would deal. She would see to it. “I love you, Buffy.”

“I love you back. Now go. Get out of here quick and beat the rush.” 

He’d kissed her; a quick but lingering engagement, then headed for the door.

Just before he’d disappeared through it, she’d said it; a promise, made around balled-up fists and a sharp breath. “We’ll figure something out.”

He’d stilled, just briefly, then nodded and slipped through, closing the door quietly behind him. And was back in a couple of hours, an outdated bag printed with the legend, ‘Dykebar Hospital, Paisley’ dangling from his left hand. 

He’d met Buffy down in the main kitchen. She’d had a mug ready for him, and had commandeered a spot at the microwave. While all the baby Slayers watched in disbelief she’d nodded at him to fang out; then while every young Slayer in the room stood around tense and jumpy, had him nick open the bag, eyes focused only on her while she took it from him, gaze riveted on him in turn and broadcasting, she hoped, everything she felt as she poured his gleanings into the largest mug she could find in the whole damn scullery, set it to exactly the right time, and waited with him, holding the still-partly-full container loosely in one hand. 

Xander had come by at one point, seen the bag, and relaxed visibly as he’d neared, which, jeez. /Chill out, Xander. He’s not going to drain me./ 

Then he’d caught sight of the legend on the bag and drawn closer to snicker, “Oh, God, I wish Wil was here to see this. Is that seriously the name of a _hospital?”_

Spike had torn his eyes away from Buffy’s to roll them at him. “For God’s sake, Harris, you’re a bloody grown man.”

“Who still has a sense of humor. I mean, just wow.” And he’d wandered off, chuckling to himself, to get a bowl of stew from the ever-present pot over on the stove.

All around him, the baby Slayers had swirled, coalescing into clumps and little eyots of murmuring, uneasy conversation, all eyes on the supposedly-tame vampire standing in their midst, calmly sipping blood and ignoring them all; a pale island in a sea of awaiting death.

Later, though, after Spike had finished the entirety of his meal and was off visiting with Dawn, Xander had come back to tug Buffy aside, looking uncomfortable. “This, uh, isn’t personal, Buff. It’s… just a question. Just a… you know… ‘trying to understand’ thing. A ‘getting on the same page’ deal. But that was… you know. Human blood.”

Buffy had sighed and nodded, arms crossed as she’d looked out into the nighttime courtyard. “Yes, it was.”

Left without an opening, Xander had hemmed and hawed a little more, then finally went for it. “It’s just… back when… When he was coming down from the whole, ‘under control of the First’ thing… you were all… ‘he’s having withdrawals, we have to keep him on pig till he gets past it’…”

Buffy had nodded again, gaze riveted on the aged, dirt-encrusted cobbles between her boots. /Dammit. Okay./ “I was wrong, Xander. I was functioning off of a fundamental misunderstanding. Those weren’t withdrawals because he was ‘high’ on some kind of drug.” Lifting her eyes to meet her friend’s, she focused them firmly on his, uncompromising. “He’s not like some pet cougar I have to avoid giving raw meat to or he’ll go homicidal. Human blood is what he’s _supposed_ to live on. Pig _isn’t_. His body was freaking out because he was getting everything he actually _needed_ for the first time in years; like having no vitamins and no veggies and living on stale Twinkies or something, and then getting a three-course meal after three-and-a-half years of slow starvation.” Buffy felt her lips twist, felt the anger rise in her, the disgust in herself for being so blind about it all. /‘There’s blood in the gravy’. God, what a bitch./ “Going back to other stuff… His body was being denied what it needed, so of _course_ it reacted; fanged out instinctively, all that. It was fighting for its life.” And how much did she hate herself, now, in retrospect, for thinking of someone she had, even then, loved, as some kind of junkie for needing something that was quite simply… sustenance.

It was like telling him that he was a horrible person for wanting to not-starve. Like telling anyone else that they shouldn’t be addicted to water, or eating at all.

She had been denying him his very right to exist. /I did that, to his face, over and over again, the entire time he was in our hands and dependent on us. On me. I did it all the time, really, even when I needed him. God, I was such an idiot about my double-standards./

The worst part was, ally or no, she wasn’t sure back then if she had really believed he _should_ continue to exist. That any demon had any right to live in the same world she did. /Because they weren't really people to me./  
  
/Fuck./

“But… Xander began, clearly nonplussed, “he lived on… on the pig’s blood for… I mean, he was…”

“So skinny he looked like he was about to break,” Buffy insisted stonily. /As in, how he stood up under the brutality of our affair is still kind of beyond my understanding. Vampires are made of sterner stuff than you can possibly imagine./ “And let me tell you; he was nowhere near as strong as he was back when we used to fight when he was running around with Drusilla. And if you want more evidence; Angel? You should see him now. He looks like hell, after years on that stuff.” /Not skinny; kind of the opposite, but I guess it kinda depends on the vamp./ She’d shaken her head, gripped with self-despite and a new resolve to do better. “Don’t worry, Xan. I know how to manage my vampire. I don’t need any help.”

Xander had backed off without moving at all. “Yeah. Yeah… you always did. I… should just… back off. Sorry. I just… was wondering.”

She needed to be less defensive. It was important to educate, if she was going to fix things. So she’d exhaled long and slow and told herself to stand down before she messed this up too. “No. Sorry. I get it. And I don’t mind questions. I’m mostly mad at myself, for assuming, all those years. For not listening.” /God, I’m still so mad at myself, in hindsight./

Xander had stilled. “And you are now. Listening.” It wasn’t quite a question.

She’d answered it anyway. “Yeah.” /You have no idea how much I’ve learned by just _listening_ , instead of dictating./

“Well… uh… I mean, it sounds like… you’ve got a lot of food for thought out of… Out of listening.”

“Xan, you have no idea.”

The food for thought had led, of course to revelations which were too much for some of the leadership. Now that the question of security had been accounted for, the tensions there were palpable. And as for the lower tiers of slayerdom… The susurrus of discussion followed Buffy and her vampire thereafter, trailed by a low, and growing murmur of unwilling speculation. 

The slayerettes began to eye Buffy askance during trainings; a time when she did not, as a general rule, always keep her hair down. She wasn’t about to change that fact for their comfort. 

The murmurings began to turn to mutiny.

The outside threat dissolved, the internal tensions bedeviling the Slayer Organization were laid bare, and it became clear fairly quickly that most of them stemmed from Buffy’s presence. Or, rather, from the confusion her ambivalent presence caused. The equivocation she sparked in their conviction, the way she confused their sense of identity. She hadn’t meant to cause said identity to come under attack from both sides, merely by the very fact of her existence, but there it was. She had brought back with her not only living proof of their demon heritage—via the now-extinct Scourge—but also a much more amorphous threat, in her very clear preference for vampire companionship. This orientation outlined, for her sisters, a side to their natures that none of them had before questioned, or had previously discounted, or avoided like the plague. A driving urge to seek the dark and the wild. An impulse to question their role on the line between the dark and the light. 

Her existence threw their entire worldview into chaos. 

They didn’t need proof of the full extent of her relationship with Spike for it to cause them problems. It didn’t matter that some of them suspected. Just the fact of them was enough to set the Slayers fighting amongst themselves, some in defense of her actions and some in clear derision, and… She was causing too much trouble being here. Dissension in the ranks was becoming common. Fallout was swift and incriminating. 

The Brittany group had left as swiftly as they were able, the London cell shortly thereafter, but they would carry the uncertainty along with them. The damage, it seemed, had been done. And here, at home in Scotland… “You sure you wanna do this, Love?”

She bottled up a sigh. “Yes. It’s pretty clear now that I’m doing more harm than good by staying. And they don’t need me. Not for the everyday stuff.” She looked out over the bag she was packing, trying not to let the emotions swamp her; the feeling of failure. The feeling that she was being, once more, run out of her ‘house’ with only Spike at her back. 

/This isn’t the same. I’m _choosing_ to leave, for the greater good./ And this time, Dawn would be coming with them. She would be taking her family with her. The Slayers she’d trained… Well. “Satsu will be great at running this cell. And Rowena and Renee will make great seconds. Xander’s gonna be fine helping them keep things on an even keel. And it’s not like they won’t know how to find me if anything major goes down…”

“Buffy…”

She lifted one shoulder in a sad little half-shrug. “Hopefully they’ll settle back down, without me around. Forget. Shove it all back down in the backs of their minds, somewhere…” She lifted her head to look over the stuff hanging in the standalone wardrobe. Made a sour face. “I don’t need all that. I meant to get more of those loose-collar shirts anyway; like the red one? I like those. Maybe in three or four colors. I like the way they sit on me. Loose, but still kind of, you know. Discreet. Kind of fun.” Her eyes flickered to meet his, and she smiled bravely. “Maybe I won’t need ‘em, though, anymore, since…”

“Oh, Christ, Buffy; I’m that sorry.” He stood there, hands hanging helplessly at his sides. “I never meant for this to happen.”

“I know.” She turned away, moving for her phone. “I still need to call Wil. She needs to know about Xander. Just in case, since we won’t be here to keep an eye on him.” Shaking her head briskly, she sighed a little. “If anything’ll be strong enough to bring her back, it’s him. She loves him to pieces. And, maybe, if she knows I’m gone, she might even come, since I’m pretty sure it’s me she’s been avoiding me for some reason...”

Spike was there, catching the phone from her hands. Sat on the bed, pulling her down with him, into his arms. “Buffy, just stop for a mo’, alright? Sodding fuck, this is…”

She tensed, unable to do as he asked and survive. Not yet. “I can’t,” she whispered. “Not right now. If I fall apart, I won’t be able to do this.” She could already hear her voice shaking, with only this. This short insistence on remaining still. “Just… let me get through the planning, and then…”

He let out a breath, but reluctantly released her. “What do you need me to do?”

Her eyes jerked over to meet his, and she knew he could read everything there; all that she was holding back. All that she could not dare feel right now and make it through. “Tell Xander we need to talk to him? I’ll catch Satsu after. And…” Keeping her face schooled to blankness, she looked down at her phone. “We’re not gonna be able to take the jet, are we? I mean, it’s a, what? Six, eight-hour flight to St. Petersburg from here. Even if Dawn will fit on there, laying down, it’s not like she can use the in-flight bathroom. We’re gonna have to figure out some other way to cross Europe with her… so I guess we can tell those guys they’re free to head home?”

“Yeah. I guess. Pity.” Spike grunted. “Maybe I’ll nick us another campervan, can we find a way to squeeze her in and out of the bloody thing. At least then we can decide amongst ourselves where we can find her pit stops.”

Buffy shook her head grimly, feeling overwhelmed but glad of the details that whirled in her head. It kept the emotions at bay. “Somehow I don’t think anyone had giants in mind when they designed roadside rest stops. We’ll figure something out, though.”

Spike grunted. “Not everything between here and Russia is anything like utterly paved over, pet. We’ll manage. And if anyone gives us trouble along the way, I’ll just bite ‘em.”

“Of course.” Even when she was losing her mind, he could always make her smile.

“I’ll see to it.”

She caught his eye as he headed for the door. “Thank you, Spike.”

He tilted his head at her, the way he did when he was trying to see into her. “‘Course, Love.” And he was gone.

Pulling in a deep, bracing breath, Buffy dialed second number she had on speed-dial, though it was one she seldom used anymore, and prayed that, just this once, Willow would actually be there to answer. 

‘Buffy? What’s wrong?’

The sound of her voice brought an exhale of relief, if swiftly followed by a twinge of pain. Because, obviously there had to be something wrong, if she was going to call at all. That was where they were at, the two besties who had once called every day, multiple times a day just to chat about boys (or girl, even), or Dawn, or life. But then one bestie had gotten way into magicks, and never told the other about the whole ‘into girls’ thing, and the other had been hurt about not being trusted with such a big deal, and had gotten way into the Initiative fandom; and then there was the whole mother-dying thing that just wasn’t share-able. And then one bestie had brought the other back from the dead against her will, and the other had gotten way into a vampire to cope, and hadn’t talked about that because she got too late what it was like to not be ready to be out… And now… Well. One bestie was still way into the vampire, and the other was somewhere in, maybe, South America? Or was it Nepal? Studying who knew what with the magicks and hanging with her new girlfriend, and, just, you know… 

/Lives diverge, sometimes. And a lot of old hurts get big and gulf-y when you don’t talk about the fact that you stopped… talking./ “Hey, Wil. Um… There’s been a lot. And, um… Okay. Here goes.” Deep breath. “The Scourge came here to attack us. We took them down, but we had to use magicks to do it…”

‘Wait, hang on. The Scourge are those demon-y guys who hate demons who aren’t pure, right? Why were they after the Slayers?’

“Well, it seems Slayers are part-demon, Wil.”

‘No, wait. That doesn’t make any sense, or you’d have registered on the demon-map when I spelled it back when… Remember when Tara…’

“Yeah, well, I hadn’t died yet, then. Or, at least, only once. Also, it’s not the same as being part-demon by blood. We’re part-demon by essence." /Which... wait. Is that just another word for some kind of soul? Am I also two-souled?/  
  
The realization, the garbage semantics of it, hit with the force of an unexpected sledgehammer, and, crap, why hadn't she even remotely questioned that before? It made the struggle inside her make so much sense... /And talk about making me a massive hypocrite!/  
  
And it was so not a thing she could even remotely deal with right now. /Shut it down. Deal with it later./ "Uh, remember the shadow-play, and the first Slayer, Sineya?”

‘Yeah, I remember, Buffy, but...’ 

“It’s a whole… thing. I guess it’s not enough to register on any spell. Or maybe it doesn’t register on the spell because the spell was looking for something biological, not spiritual, or…” Waving her hand helplessly in the air, Buffy gave up. This was so not her forte, even when her brain wasn't going into a spin-cycle over the questions it raised. “I dunno. You had to be there. It’s complicated…”

‘I _guess_ so.’ A pause. ‘Wait. You said you had to use magicks to defeat them…’

“Yeah. So, that’s the other thing. Giles gave Xander some easy-bake spells to use to make us some armor, and to shield us from bullets…”

‘Wait, hold up. _Xander_ did _spells?’_ She didn’t think she’d ever heard Willow sound so incredulous.

“Yeah. That’s kind of the main thing. He did really good. Better than I expected, even though it was kind of a really easy Latin one; you know he’s good with Latin..."

"Okay, but..."  
  
"...And he had help from a Slayer whose sister’s a Wicca, so she knew the ropes, kind of. But anyway, he pulled it off. Kept us alive enough to save us all..."  
  
Willow was sputtering on the other side of the line, like Buffy had utterly blown up the tenets of her reality. "But that’s the thing, Wil. Before that all he’s ever done is set a book on fire, right? And you know where he is right now, with Anya, and the thing with Dracula…”

Abrupt silence from Willow, then, ‘Oh, Goddess…’

“And I can’t stay here to keep an eye on him in case this causes a slippery slope. I have to leave. Me being here is causing a serious problem for the Slayer Organization. I need to take Dawn and get out, take a backseat role from now on, unless there’s a major apocalypse brewing. So it’s time for you to come back, Wil. Keep an eye on Xander. Make sure he doesn’t drown. You of all people know the signs…”

Something she'd said must've kickstarted Willow's vocal cords back to life. ‘Wait. Buffy, you’re going too fast! Why the heck do you have to leave? The Organization’s your baby! Nothing on Earth would make you leave unless Dawn…’

“Spike is back.”

Dead silence. Then… ‘What?’

“He’s been alive, this whole time.” Hopefully after this, and Giles, she’d never have to repeat the story again. She was getting kind of tired of it. “The amulet got sent over to Wolfram and Hart and it sort of spit him out again there. He’s been helping Angel and those guys fight the Big Bads in LA this whole time. When I found out a few days ago I went to get him. It’s a long story. But the short version is… I can’t lead the Slayer Organization as long as we’re together. It causes too many problems. And I’m _not_ giving up Spike. Not after what we’ve been through. I’ve _earned_ him. So… we’re leaving. And if they need me, they can call.”

Another complete hush from the other end of the line, then, ‘I get that, Buffy. I… really do. If I got…’ A swallow, audible over the line. ‘I…’ A distinct breath. ‘So you need me to come back. For Xander.’

“Just for a little while. To be sure he’s okay. It’s kind of an emergency. And then, if you think he’s going to pull out okay with just a little training, or if he doesn’t have enough power for it to be a problem, then obviously you shouldn’t interrupt what you’re working on forever, but, I think the risk of Xander going down the wrong road…”

‘Oh, of _course_. I mean, it’s _Xander_. I would _never_ want him to…’ She sounded shaken just thinking about it. ‘I mean, when I think of how much better off I would’ve been with a teacher; like if we’d still had Ms. Calendar around, or…’ 

Buffy winced, thinking of what had happened to Jenny Calendar. How that death had been, ultimately, her fault. And, in a way, had kind of set Willow on the road to ye witchcraft of ye darke-moste kind and all that stuff, which… Well. Obviously that had turned out a certain way. 

‘It’s weird, though,’ Wil was saying, ‘even thinking of Xander as somebody who could… I mean, I know he set the book on fire that one time, and yeah; he always had demon-y chicks after him, but I never thought…’

“I think maybe Giles actively discouraged him. When I brought it up… he didn’t seem all that surprised. Like he thought there was a fine line between ‘enough ability to get somewhere if you tried’ and Willow-status. You know, ‘it’s gonna happen anyway, whether you dabble or not’. So with you, he couldn’t have stopped you either way. But if someone had less abilities than even, you know…” She hesitated. “Tara…”

‘Yeah,” Willow agreed, more thoughtful than pained. “It makes sense. ‘Just don’t look at it and it’ll go away’ type of thing. So Xander just never realized… And neither did any of us.’ She sounded kind of floored by the thought. ‘Okay, um… I’ll tell Kennedy that I… We… Yeah. I’ll figure it out. And get out there as soon as I can wrap things up here.’

It was a huge weight off her mind. “Thank you, Wil.”

There was a short silence in the call, then, tentatively, ‘When are you leaving?’

It almost sounded like, ‘Will you be there, when I come?’ Like Wil almost had to build up the courage to see her, and what _was_ that, now, between them? 

She didn’t have time to figure it out right now, though. “Soon as we can come up with some transportation for Dawn. We need to get her to St. Petersburg to try to figure out a way to shrink her back down to size…”

‘Goddess, is she still growing?’

“She’s like fifteen feet, now. I’m hoping Giles can figure something out.”

‘And she still hasn’t said _anything?_ I mean, none of us can _help_ her if she doesn’t tell us what… I mean, not even _I_ can, if she doesn’t speak up! It’s worse than the whole rat thing!’

Buffy sighed internally. “I have high hopes she might end up telling Spike what went down. It’s the closest she’s come to telling anyone anything.”

She could almost hear Wil nodding over the line. ‘Well, they, uh, were always super close. Him and her, and, um, her and… Tara.’

“Yeah.” God, it was on the tip of her tongue, as always, to ask. To demand, /Why, Wil? Why are you staying away so much? Why have you stayed away for so _long?_ / Because just hearing her voice, having this stilted, all-business conversation that, because of their history, their familiarity, would always skirt things that were intimate and _family_ and…

It hurt. But she would not ask. She wanted Willow to volunteer it, and she would not beg for reasons. /In case… it’s me./

But she also didn’t want to end the conversation on a painful note. Not when they’d barely spoken in months. 

Luckily she did have something she could bring up to end things on a more lighthearted way. “Wil, can I ask you something?”

‘Okay?’

“It’s something Spike said. I need you to back me up.” If nothing else, it would make Wil laugh, and maybe—just maybe—It might make them feel remotely close again. “He said I wouldn’t recognize it if a woman flirted with me. Not if I was slapped over the head with it.”

To her faint horror, Willow sputtered with sudden laughter. It made the phone crackle. ‘Okay, who flirted with you? One of the Slayers?’

“Apparently Satsu’s into me?”

The giggles intensified to gasping. ‘Oh Goddess… I’m dying. That so doesn’t surprise me. Oh, I can’t wait to tell Kennedy. This is great…’ 

Did she really need to laugh so hard? “This is just something he said. It’s not, like, some kind of proven thing…”

All mirth faded, except for a few faint edges around the corners. ‘C’mon, Buffy. Spike is a really good judge of character. He picked up on me and Tara way before anyone else had any clue.’

/Well… Damn./ Buffy hesitated slightly. But… No. She just couldn’t ask about the Faith thing. Not right now. It was too weird. Besides; she’d already lost the Satsu bet anyway and she knew it. “Glad I could give everyone a reason to smile.”

‘Admit it, Buffy, he’s right. _I_ could’ve been in love with you and you would’ve missed it. You sure the heck missed it with Xander. Sometimes you’re just really blind about this stuff.’ She sounded like she was thinking about it for a sec, and Buffy could almost imagine the thoughtful Willow expression. It made her really miss her old friend. ‘I don’t even think it’s a girl thing. I think you just have no idea when people like you in general. Which is really funny, because you have to be so uber-confident in so many other places in your life, but when it comes to people…’

“Yeah, I know. Not so much with the confidence.”

A faint note of relief entered Wil’s voice when she replied. ‘Spike was always really good for you when it came to that. I can see… why you’re with him, if he’s back. Why you’d give up anything to keep him. Whatever else was between you, he was never anything less than completely in love with you.’

“Yeah.” Buffy closed her eyes and pulled in a deep breath. “That’s pretty much the size of it. When someone feels that way about you, enough to reorder their entire existence over and over again to be what you need… and then they die, it makes you realize really quick how much you actually do need them. It’s almost impossible not to feel the same way about them.”

‘Then I’m really glad you have that back.’ A note of wistfulness entered Wil’s voice. ‘I know… what it feels like to have someone look at you, and to know that as long as they’re there, you’re always going to be wonderful, and perfect, and enough to them. No matter what.’ The wistful note vanished into something firm, certain. ‘If you’ve got it back, Buffy, don’t let it get away.’

Tears prickled at her eyes. Willow understood. “Thanks, Wil.” /I don’t plan to./

***

“So, you’re really gonna do this?”

Buffy looked down at her hands. “You were right, Xander. You see them out there. Maybe if we go…”

Xander rubbed his face hard. Slid his fingers up to scratch under the eyepatch, making her wince. Shook his head, at a loss, and sat down hard in the single chair of their room. “I know I said it. I just somehow hoped…”

“You were right,” she repeated quietly.

“Yeah.” He let out a heavy breath, lifted his scarred countenance to watch them both for a moment. Spike stood next to Buffy in front of the bed, hands in his pockets. Buffy sat, playing with the little pile of clothes, folding and unfolding one shirt in a desultory fashion, not really paying much attention to what she was doing and mostly avoiding meeting Xander’s gaze. “They’re gonna think you’re running out on ‘em, you know.”

/Dammit./ “The war’s over. And you’ll know where to find us if you need us. We’ll be a phone call away. Heck, first we need to go to Giles, see if we can figure out what to do with Dawn. Try to get her back into school… They’ll get that, right? That I need to take care of my sister?” /I mean, it’s not like I ever touched down here for long between missions, anyway./

“But, like… If Wil’s coming…”

“We can’t wait for however long it takes her to wrap things up. The whole point is to get out of here before the whole Organization implodes, right?” Buffy flicked her fingers in what she hoped was a decisive manner, though she felt only a weird, whirling sense of loss, tinged with a very strange, guilty relief. “If Giles can’t figure out how to help Dawnie, maybe by then she’ll have talked, and Willow can come up with something. But either way, we need to be out.” /And is it bad that I feel so grateful that I’m doing my actual duty now, by leaving?/

Xander was nodding. “That’s the plan?”

“Yeah.”

He scrubbed his hand hard in his hair. “And Wil did say she’s coming.” That part seemed to be extremely imperative to Xander. Not that Buffy really blamed him. He had to be kind of at sea right now with the sudden pulling of the rug out from under his sense of self.

“Soon, yeah. For at least a little while.”

He let out a breath. “That’ll be good. I mean, she can keep an eye on me in case I become addict-guy, you know.” He let out a breath, tension flowing through his frame. “God, Buffy, I hate this. Where are you gonna go? I mean, after?” Clearly, if they were leaving the Organization, St. Petersburg wasn’t going to be their last stop.

Buffy wished she knew, but they had so not thought that far ahead. /Heck, I’ve never had the _chance_ to think that far ahead about my own life, Xan. How can you even _ask_ me that?/ 

Firmly setting aside the rumpled halter-top, Buffy forced herself to meet his one eye. “I have no idea. Somewhere quiet, for a little while. Somewhere we can just _be_.”

Xander’s mouth twisted so much that it pulled at his eyepatch. “Yeah, I guess… you never really got the chance to do that. Be anything but… everybody else’s, did you?” His eye flickered to Spike, and he shook his head. “You know, you’d think I’d hate you for taking her away, but it isn’t even you. She’s been a mess for so long, and I could tell her heart wasn’t in it this whole year. That she couldn’t get close to anyone. That she’s just been doing a job because it was… a duty. I thought…” His eye jerked back to Buffy’s and he sighed heavily. “I thought you’d be free, you know? Like Faith said. But you weren’t, were you? It was the same old thing, just…”

“More spread out,” Buffy answered. “Same Calling, just diffused over a bunch more people. Different responsibility, less organized enemy. It’s more stressful, somehow, than when you know where the bad guys are coming from.” She looked down at her burn-scarred fingers, not even bothering to deny that she had been a disaster all last year, if a quieter one than she had been after her resurrection. More together on the surface, just as diffuse and aimless beneath. “I thought I was doing them all a big favor, you know? Giving them their power? Unhooking them from the wheel; the one Faith and I and Kendra were tied to. The being Called and dying and Called and dying…” 

She felt Spike’s startled gaze rivet itself to back of her neck. Avoided it to shrug slightly. “I mean, I wasn’t trying to shove them into this huge conundrum for the rest of their lives. I totally thought that part was just my hang-up, and what they’d have to deal with, they already had, as Potentials. The urges to fight, the crazy energy, all the weird drives, the restlessness, the feeling that they were different somehow. I was just giving them their full strength; giving them focus and power for what they already had, you know?” She felt Spike move to settle onto the bed behind her, a quiet, supportive presence, as the retrospective guilt flooded her. “I wasn’t trying to take their human lives, their human choices away from them, or to saddle them with this… loneliness.”

“Don’t do this to yourself, pet. You didn’t put it there, what’s in them. Those old gits did it, long ago. They were a bunch of sodding cowards who didn’t want to fight their own ruddy battles, so they raped a young girl, saw to it they could cage thousands after, turn ‘em into ignorant weapons. You freed them from that; from the original wrong done them. You’ve redressed the balance; taken the power away from a bunch of old geezers and put it back into the girls’ hands, to hold for themselves.”

Buffy found certain cobalt eyes; clung to the conviction there. “Are you sure? That it’s worth the tradeoff? For them and for the world? I mean, look at that balance. How many of us are out there now, knocking off demons who might not need it, or…”

Spike waved off that consideration like he was batting away a fly. “Bit unfair to have hundreds of you bints runnin’ about, yeah, but you’ll train ‘em to do it right. You’re not like those shortsighted pricks kept your lot hostage forever, innit? You’re tryin’ to redress that balance too, no matter what it costs you. You know how much I love you for that, Buffy?” He moved around to crouch in front of her, caught her chin with his fingers. “And when it comes to the rest—the drives you’re worried about—they can choose when it comes to that, too. Just the same as choosin’ whether or not to use the power, instead of bein’ forced to by some old sod who comes along like they did with you, when you were too young to know which way was up, and takin’ control of their lives to tell them what to do and how to live and who to shag and all the rest…”

“But they don’t get to have a normal life anymore; just date and get married and… live. They can’t ignore what they are…”

Spike’s voice hardened to a growl. “You didn’t make ‘em vessels of the Line, Buffy, so stop this. You broke them free from a destiny that’d destroy them all one by one. They’re stronger together. You’ve seen to it they’re not carrying the baggage you did. And you were in a sodding war. People have to make unethical fucking decisions in battle all the bloody time in order to win. The war we were in was the one to end everything, would’ve killed the lot if you hadn’t played to win, so I don’t see as you had any other bleedin’ option. You couldn’t just power up the chits you had on hand. It was all of ‘em or none; not that you had any fucking clue there were hundreds more about. Watcher didn’t tell you that, did he? What’d he say about it?”

Buffy struggled with it. “'A handful',” she admitted.

“That’s right. You asked the lot you had with you did you have their consent. At best you thought you might be pushin’ the thing on two, three others else. You’d no clue; and like you said. They’re all destined to die anyway, one by one, like soddin’ dominoes. Only, this way, you’ve reset the deck and cheated a house has always won before.”

Buffy nodded, praying he was right. It had been niggling at her, a nighttime fear, for a year now.

“He’s right, Buff.” Xander sounded pained to be agreeing with Spike, but it didn’t stop him doing so.

“Course I’m bloody right,” her exasperated vampire replied. “And any road, what’s done is done, so best get on. You’re doin’ what you can for ‘em now by leavin’ ‘em to find their own way without prejudice. You’ve done your best to keep ‘em from bein’ a load of murderin’ madwomen, or bein’ too confused so they hesitate when they shouldn’t. And you’ll be about to make sure they don’t kill the wrong sorts, as well, or get knocked off in the next apocalypse, so I think you’ve done your sodding part.”

Xander hove into view, on his feet now. “I’m with Not-Evil Undead, here. Stop beating yourself up, Buff. I know these girls. The ones who are here are here because they believe in the work. The ones who aren’t made their choice and are living their lives however they want. All you did was give it to ‘em instead of letting some dickhead Watcher take it away from them like they did to you. And look what those bastards did to Faith!”

Buffy nodded, fighting down the lump in her throat. She knew damn well how cruel the system had been to her sister from another mother.

“So yeah. Let it go. You’re doing everything you can. Let me pick up where you left off, and I’ll…” He rubbed his hands together and started pacing the floor a little anxiously. “I’ll do whatever you say—anything you want—to get them where you want them to be. To give them the best chance to make this thing work, alright?”

Buffy lifted her head to watch her old friend from the corners of her eyes. “You sure about that, Xan? There’ll be a few revisions to the curriculum. I’ve seen a few things, and learned a hell of a lot about demons—and Slayers, and vampires, and myself—while we were in hell.”

Xander sighed ruefully, but nodded as he turned back. “Yeah, well… I kinda figured. Much as I don’t want to hear it, I guess I’m about to get my horizons expanded. So, lay it on me. What do you have?”

“I…” Buffy glanced over at Spike. “We… wrote some of it out in the last couple days. But it’s not done yet. I’ll have to finish it on the trip. I’ll mail it to you when we get to Russia or something. Give Giles and Andrew a copy while we’re there, send one to Robin…”

Xander looked a little wild-eyed, but he strove to remain impassive. “What, like a new manual?”

“If I say yes, are you gonna freak?”

Xander’s single eye fled to Spike’s face. Spike didn’t betray a single change of expression, and he finally looked away, back to Buffy. “I’m game to learn,” he said finally. “I’m grown up enough to admit… I’ve been surprised a few times. And that I might not know everything. And it’s always best to know more, right, than to get dead?”

“Or to kill the wrong people,” Buffy murmured softly, and touched Spike’s hand lightly with her own. She lifted her eyes back to Xander’s. “I’m hoping… maybe there’ll be less people out to get us if we’re not always out to get them.”

“It’s a sound policy,” Spike answered blandly.

Xander frowned, clearly stunned both by her parlance and the sentiment. “Huh. By people, you mean demons, right? Just to be clear.”

 _“People,_ Xander. Judged on their own merits and on individual actions; not because they’re clawed, furry, green… flappy-skinned…”

Xander shoved a hand through his hair for the whatevereth time and sat back down heavily. Clem had always been a very clear kink in the works when it came to the whole ‘demons are bad’ classification system. “Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Alright. Textbook en route. Study the new system. Gotcha.” He focused on Buffy, frowning a little, visibly reshuffling. “So… right. Till then, we handle the day-to-day stuff. And when something comes that’s too big for us to cope with on our own, and we need your specialty touch…”

She felt her lips twitch in old, dry amusement. “If the apocalypse comes, text me.”

It made him smile, ruefully. “Oh, man. You know it will. Probably sometime next May. They were just a little late this year.”

She snorted a half-laugh, felt its echo behind her in the mostly-silent Spike as Xander stepped forward to catch her up in a hug. And let herself be embraced. 

She had always loved Xander-hugs. They were so giving, so full of friend-mojo. Long-since emptied of all that wishful thinking that had once characterized his hopeful embracements of the high school years, these were simply comforting and warm. “I’m going to miss you so much.”

“Yeah, me too. But you know; just a phone call away and all that jazz.”

“Same here. Anytime.”

He stepped back then, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Are there gonna be, you know… any last-minute orders?”

/God, so many./ “Um, see if any of the girls have any witchy sisters—or, I guess, brothers—like Daphne has? See if there are any local shamans or anything who might want to join up? A recruitment program, to get us a sort of Wicca-arm to the Organization. Heck, maybe some of the Slayers might have the aptitude, who knows?” An almost heretical thought occurred to her, and she blurted it out without thinking it entirely through. “Maybe it’s nuts—I mean, I always thought you either _had_ power or you _were_ power, but who knows? What if someone already had it before they were Called; from their human side? Anyway, maybe Wil can figure out a way to test ‘em or something?” Thinking this much about things that had never occurred to her before was headache-inducing, on top of so many emotions. “I just think we’re gonna need the firepower. We don’t want to get caught with our pants down like that again.”

“Huh. I mean, check. I sure don’t wanna have to be the guy to try to do the spell stuff next time. That was… woah.”

Buffy would take his reluctance as a good sign. “Oh, and there are three girls down in LA that are gonna either need to end up on someone’s roster, or they’re probably gonna turn rogue. Spike and I rescued them from a vamp in LA. He was using them to train his nest. They got pretty badly abused…”

Xander’s eye jerked up to meet Spike’s where he was back sitting next to Buffy with an arm behind her to brace her back. Caught the bleak expression there. “Oh, man. Was this in regular LA or in this hell thing?”

“Hell-A, mate. Names are Nicole, Brenda, and Tonya. Tough chits, all of ‘em. The time-loop will have healed all the physical damage, but they’ll remember everything that happened to ‘em, so the emotional damage...” Spike trailed off, flicking his thumb lightly over his Zippo; open and closed, open and closed. It was the only measure of his agitation. The rest of him appeared cool as a cucumber, of course. It was a lie, but one easily read by the initiated.

“Most of LA’s probably suffering from PTSD,” Buffy finished for him. “I don’t have to tell you what that kind of thing does to a Slayer. You saw it in me. In Faith.”

“Oh, man.”

“They definitely didn’t trust me by the end, so I didn’t try to talk up the Organization too much, but if we can’t get them to join up, maybe we can send Faith down to pick ‘em up? She might be good at talking them down. I might even ask her myself. She’s got the background to maybe get what they’re going through.”

Spike grunted at that, and flipped the lighter decisively shut. “That bird might just be the ticket, actually. Should get her to start a Slayer rehab.”

Xander snorted at that mental image. “We’ll send out feelers.”

Buffy lifted her eyes up to meet Xander’s. “I’m leaving you and Satsu in charge, Xan. Rowena can be second. Not Renee. She’s…” The hesitation was unfortunate, but so was the subject matter. “She’s too hung up on you to be objective.”

Xander jerked. “You think…” He frowned thoughtfully, looking slightly poleaxed. _“Really?”_

Spike scoffed incredulously. “You’re as bloody oblivious as the Slayer, here, when it comes to seein’ what’s in front of you, Harris.”

Xander threw Spike a jaundiced look. “What, because Buffy didn’t realize you were all stupid over her for years?”

“‘No, lackwit; because she didn’t notice the Japanese bird was. No more’n you saw that Red was gone over you all those years ago, till that blew up in your bloody face.”

/Well, wow. You were paying attention way before any of us knew you even cared what happened between all of us./ “Spike, that was so a hundred years ago.”

“And completely a mistake!” Xander exclaimed. “And obviously some kind of bizarre chemistry thing that just had to run its course and get out of the way, and what’s this about Satsu?” His eyes jerked to Buffy’s, clearly rattled. 

Buffy heaved a weary sigh, avoiding her guy’s knowing gaze. “According to Spike, Satsu’s got a crush on me.”

Xander sat back down heavily and let out a long breath. “Well. That could make things more complicated. Or, I guess it would have, if you were staying…”

“Chit practically throws daggers at me with her eyes every time I so much as breathe near the Slayer.” Everything about his stance said that Spike for sure planned to collect on their bet. Not now, obviously, because things were super tense. But soon.

Xander grunted. “Maybe she just doesn’t like vampires.”

“Willow didn’t think so, when I brought it up.”

That brought his eye flying back to meet hers. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, she sounded totally unsurprised. And completely amused by the whole thing, by the way. Which is so not helpful. Wil and Spike should start a newsletter called ‘laugh about Buffy’s lesbian fan club’.”

Spike snorted again, this time in dark amusement. Xander’s gaze flickered to him, back to Buffy. “Well… Damn.”

“Yeah.” Buffy hesitated, but it remained. Her one final question, and she needed the advice. “Xan… I’m not sure what to do with the Scythe. I need your input. Do you think I should pass it on to Satsu? Keep it in the HQ? Or will she see that as some kind of sign of my favor, you think? Too much encouragement? I mean, it _is_ a badge of office, but if she feels that way about me… Or I could mail it to Faith, I suppose,” she went on, frowning thoughtfully, “but really, she’s kind of in the same boat as I am right now. Kind of a Slayer-on-call, so it seems kind of weird to send it to her, right? Since she’s not really leading anyth…”

“Keep it, Buff.”

That was the one answer Buffy hadn’t expected. “What?”

“At least till we’re sure how things are gonna go down.”

“But… it belongs to the Organization. To the leader of the Slayers. And if I step down, then I’m not…”

“Like hell it does.” Xander leaned forward, arms on his knees. “Buffy, that thing came to you. You put in the work to find it. It should stay with you.”

“Bloody Amen.” It was startling, how often they were agreeing after so many years spent at odds about everything, but Spike’s low growl of consonance was plain and almost violent, it was so harshly in tune with Xander’s sentiments.

Xander’s gaze slipped back once more very briefly to meet Spike’s before he returned it back to Buffy’s, firm and solemn. “It’s kind of part of the Emergency Slayer Broadcast System or whatever. Dial in case of Apocalypse; like you, now.” He straightened up. “If you need it, you’ll have it. If Faith needs it, you send it to her. If one of the other cells needs it, we know who to call. But maybe better if it stays somewhere kind of mobile and less, you know, centralized, so that it can go wherever it needs to go, you know what I mean?”

He had a point. “I guess. If you don’t think it’ll cause problems. I don’t want people to think I’m just, you know, running off with it. I mean, they’ve all touched it. They’ll all feel like it…” How to explain? “When you’re a Slayer and you touch it, it feels like it belongs to you. Like it’s a part of you. For me to keep it to myself might feel like I’m putting myself above them somehow; like I’m making some kind of a statement. And right now, with where I’m at and everything, that might be kind of dangerous. To the Organization. To the way the Slayers think of themselves.”

Xander shrugged. “You let me and Giles and Andrew worry about that. We’ll do spin control. Maybe Wil’ll help us come up with something.” Shrugging, he stood to approach and squeezed Buffy on the shoulder. “We have your back, Buff. When have we not?”

/Only one time./

He must’ve been thinking the same thing, because his eye rose to meet Spike’s. “Counting on you watch her back this time, too. The way you did the other time she didn’t have any of us.”

“You know I will.”

Nodding, Xan released her shoulder. “I’m gonna go get everyone set. Prep the place so when the bomb drops, they’ll be ready.” He pulled in a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “When… do you think?”

Buffy caught his eye firmly. “Tomorrow.”

A slight look of shocked panic hit his features. “Oh. Okay. Yeah. Alright.” Turning for the door, he let out the remains of the breath, shook out his hands. “Okay! Yeah. Tomorrow…”

“Xander?”

He turned back.

“I love you and you’re amazing.”

The panic faded, leaving behind merely the slow smile; pain under it, of course, and the faintly-wounded look of the deserted, but mostly just philosophical acceptance, understanding, warmth, love… and zero bitterness. “Back atcha, Buff.” And then tilted his head. “Gotta go. Put on my leader shirt. Ask myself the old question, you know? ‘What would Buffy do’….” And opening the door, he headed out with his small, reassuring grin mostly intact.

As the portal closed behind him Spike moved, finally, to take a seat beside her. “He took that well.”

“He’s a good friend,” Buffy answered. She hated like hell to leave him alone like this. She felt like a terrible friend in return to do it, but… What the hell else could she in good conscience _do?_

A cool, comforting arm slid around her shoulders. “He’ll be alright, luv. He’s a big boy. He’ll have Red to help for a bit. And we’ll be checking in. Every week, innit?”

She let out a breath, hoping it would be enough. “Yeah. Every week.” Closing her eyes, she let him pull her close, finally. And bit her lip. “This is so hard.”

“I know.” Cool lips descended to touch her forehead. “You want me to tell Dawn on my own, or do you wanna come?”

“No,” she whispered. “We should do it together.” /Start how we plan to go on./

“Right, then.”

“Before she hears it from someone else, or we’ll never hear the end of it.”

“That case, pet, we’d better run. It’s a long bloody drive to Russia with that kind of screeching takin’ up the cab.”

***

“Seriously, though, why Russia? Why can’t we just go straight to wherever you want us to live? I mean, think about it. We can find a place with just a really big basement, or some kind of shed or something, and I can stay like this. I’m _useful_ like this. I mean, if there’s another battle, or if they call and we need to head back to fight some kind of huge demon-thing, or a troop of gurgly slime-monsters, or a dragon-y thing and you need someone big to strangle it, or…”

“Dawn, this isn’t a democracy. We’re going to see Giles. He’s going to research ways to reverse the spell. Then when fall semester starts, you’re going back to Berkeley.”

You'd never lived till you saw a fifteen-foot-tall girl flounce her hair dramatically. “Oh wow. You are so not fair. Like, I don’t even get a say in my own life! I mean, has it occurred to you that I might _like_ being a giant? That I might _like_ having a special ability? That I might like…” 

“Peeing in a bucket and taking baths in a lake? No.” Was this ever going to get any easier, any less exasperating, being a sister-parent? “A, you’re on a high now, so it hasn’t hit you, but once you sit with it…” /God, once she sits with it and really lets herself feel that she… That she killed living creatures…/

Buffy still wasn’t sure how _she_ dealt with it the first few times. Granted, she was younger, and then she just got numb… most of the time. But there was damage; damage she was still unraveling, bit by fucked-up bit. /I never wanted that for you./ “It hasn’t really sunk in yet because they didn’t look like anything you want to feel sad about, but…”

“Okay, but, like, it needed to be done, right? So why cry about…”

“…And you’re gonna need to be able to talk to one of us about it, not push that away… much less ever have to do that again, because we don’t want that for you, okay Dawnie?” Buffy rode right over her sister’s protests, because she didn’t know, and then flicked her eyes to Spike’s, caught his equally-exasperated expression… and decided on the spur of the moment to throw him under the bus as an example. “B, this isn’t an ability, it’s a curse… and let me tell you something I’ve learned about curses versus abilities. I’ve seen a soul put on a vampire as a curse, and one gained as a choice and used as an ability. And the difference is huge. You see how Angel acts about his soul. That isn’t because his soul is a tortured one, because I’ve gone back in time with him. I’ve seen who Liam was before he was sired…”

For the first time in the conversation, Dawn looked seriously thrown. “You… How…”

“Long story. It’s not important. Shut up and listen.”

Dawn subsided, sullen and offended. 

“I’ll just say that he wasn’t a great guy as a human, and he for sure wasn’t someone who would be too incredibly tortured by the stuff Angelus did.”

Spike made a derisive noise. Buffy ignored him. “All the regret and atonement stuff? That’s because of the _curse_ , not because Angel’s soul is such a pretty one. Because let me tell you; he can still get crazy violent and kind of terrifying even when he doesn’t have an ounce of vampire in him. And that’s a fact.”

Dawn frowned, assimilating this revelation. “Okay, but what does that have to do with…”

Buffy held up a hand to forestall her. “It has to do with what was done to you. You’ve been _cursed_ , Dawn. No matter what you do or how hard you try, you’re not gonna be able to turn this into happy-happy-joy-joy stuff. You might be able to reach some kind of… what’s the word?” She waved a hand in the air, seeking the right word. 

“Equilibrium?” Spike suggested softly, sounding fascinated by her minor rant.

“Yeah, that; the way Angel has, even use it to do some good sometimes. But it’ll never be good _for_ you. Curses aren’t meant to be comfortable or easy, and they’re not something you’re supposed to have in the normal course of your life. So it’s never gonna be a talent, the way Spike uses his soul; because even if having his human soul up front and center has hurt Spike a lot sometimes, he _chose_ it, and he’s adaptable enough that he’s made it work for him. But partly that’s because it wasn’t a curse, so he’s been able to turn it into a useful tool. And _that’s_ the difference.” 

Spike made a sound in the resultant silence; half of assent and half of surprise for her choice of insights. Buffy shot him a glance over her shoulder, wondering if he disagreed.

“No, you’re right, pet. And any road, if this one keeps growing, it’s going to start causing you some serious problems, Niblet. No doubt life-threatening ones round about the time the snow flies, yeah? I’m with big sis. Maybe it’s time to start thinkin’ a bit harder about why you’re clingin’ so tight to your own curse, the way my ponce of a grandsire cuddles his.”

Dawn gaped at him in shock. “Okay, that’s just rude, comparing me to Angel! I _hate_ that guy.”

“That’s my Bit.” And he ruffled her hair and leaned back against her bench-deal, looking predictably proud. 

Sighing, Buffy leaned forward, got right into her sister’s face. Standing, and with Dawn sitting, she could just barely manage it. “I can only think of one reason why anyone would cling to a curse. Angel hangs onto his because he thinks he deserves it, and because he’s scared of who he is without it. I don’t think you’re scared of who you are when you’re normal-sized. Maybe bored, but not scared. So I’m gonna say this once. If it’s because you think you deserve this, that’s crap, Dawn. I don’t want to hear that. So tell me right now. What. _Happened?”_

Dawn blanched and leaned back to get some personal space. “I’m just trying to make the best of it. In case it, you know, can’t change. Because I, you know… brought it on myself, so…”

/Oh my _God!/ “Tell_ me.” 

Young, pained eyes tore themselves away from hers. “No. You’d so completely judge me.”

“I _won’t.”_

“I…” Dawn huffed, tears gathering in huge eyes. “I _can’t_.”

“Christ.” The mutter was audible in the stable. “Then tell _me_ , Platelet.”

Panicked eyes fled to Spike’s. “God. _You_ might judge me even _more!”_

That pronouncement clearly blew Spike’s mind. “Where the hell would I get off judging _anyone?”_

“You know what? Can we just drop it?”

“Fine.” Buffy was so done with the whole everything between fourteen and eighteen. “You can tell us in Russia. Till then, we need to get you packed up.”

Chastened, Dawn sighed heavily. “How long do I have to say goodbye to everyone?” she asked quietly.

“We’re leaving sometime tomorrow. Spike’s gonna go on the lookout online for some kind of van or something big enough to fit you…”

That made Dawn blink. “You know how to use the Internet?” she demanded of Spike.

“Yeah, and I can play a mean ‘Crash Bandicoot’.”

Excitement bloomed in Dawn’s features. “Okay, see, now why didn’t you say _that?_ Just thinking I might get to play _videogames_ against you might be enough to convince me to get shrunk back down to normal size. It was one thing to, you know, paint nails and watch movies with you, but ‘Crash _Bandicoot’?”_

Spike looked ceilingward as if seeking patience. “‘The follies of men’s youth are in retrospect glorious compared to the follies of old age.’”

Dawn’s expression dissolved into sheer confusion. “Okay?”

Buffy favored her lover with a tolerant look. “He does that. You just have to kind of ignore it.” 

“Since _when?”_

/Since he accidentally let me know that he’s a frustrated poet./ Spike’s warning glare, though, cut off any explanation; even if she had meant to give one. Which she _hadn’t_. “Long story.” /But it does give me good blackmail material, so watch out, William./ Though, granted, if Dawn lived with them for long enough, she was bound to figure it out sooner or later herself. Which would be… interesting. “Pile your stuff. We’ll find you something to put it in.”

“As if I have so much. I mean, all my clothes are still in Rome. I’m wearing blankets sewn together into skirts and halter-tops, Buffy.”

/Oh my God, stop fighting with me, Dawn./ She gritted her teeth, seeking patience. “You have non-clothes stuff.”

That arrested her sister mid-protest. “Yeah, okay. Good call. Though, most of that’s still boxed up in Rome, too.”

“Thought that place still looked bloody lived-in,” Spike muttered grimly.

“Mia, the decoy, mostly stays there,” Buffy informed him flatly. “We’re mostly using it as sort of a storage waystation till we could get everything up here that we had to ship over from Berkeley. But I wasn’t going to bother, if I could just get Dawn back the right size and send her back to school…”

“You never even asked me if I _wanted_ to go back there! I mean, I so don’t know if I can _face_ those people, after…”

Buffy whirled on her sister, barely controlling her frustration. “After _what_ , Dawn?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

Someday she was going to bang her head against a stone wall after one of these conversations. “Fine. When we find you a suitcase we’ll bring it down.”

“Ugh. You’re so irritating.”

/Ditto./ “I’m going to go find Satsu and let her know what’s going on.” Heading out through the wide doorway, Buffy focused on her breathing. /In through the nose, out through the mouth./ And heard Spike, behind her, trying to make their peace for them.

“She just wants to help, Niblet. You know that, right? Why’re you tryin’ to put her back up like that? Slammin’ the door on her every time she sticks her foot in?”

“Why does she have to jump in and try to rip it open all the time? Hasn’t she ever heard of _privacy?”_

/Oh for God’s sake; this could be a life or death scenario, Dawn! Could you be more dramatic and adolescent?/

“She loves you. And she’s been where you are.”

The shiver ran through Buffy’s very being. /Dammit, that’s the problem./ She really hoped to God that wasn’t true. But it seemed more and more like it was probably something like that.

***

  
Satsu would barely look at the Slayer as they stood outside the gates, prepared to step into the converted bus for the journey. Clearly she felt deserted and betrayed in far greater measure than Harris did by her upcoming departure. 

Harris, for his part, was handling things as philosophically as he’d done from the start. He had helped load up the vehicle earlier in the day without complaint, Rowena and Renee helping, both chits looking a bit sad over it. Now he stood by, as diffident as ever, and tugged his hands out of his pockets. “Well… Take care of yourself, Buff.” Held out his arms for her to join him for another of those hugs they liked so bloody much, did a bit of squeezing the life out of her, or trying, because he could. “I want you to know, I get it. And… I appreciate what you’re doing.”

Give credit where it was due, the lad had grown up well enough. And what he was saying appeared to move Buffy no end. So that was alright. 

Then, to Spike’s near-shock, the boy held his hand out to yours truly. “Never gonna like you,” he pronounced with a faint smile tugging at the corners of mouth and eyes.

/Ah. That’s how we’re playin’ it, then. Keep the bloody egos intact and that./ “Same.” Spike shook the proffered hand once, firmly.

“Take care of them.”

“Always.” 

“All I can ask.” And turning away, Harris looked up to meet Dawn’s eyes. “See you, Dawnie.”

Niblet did a maneuver where she more or less flung herself down on her knees to wrap her gigantic arms around the blokes’ neck. “I love you, Xander. You know that, right?”

“Same goes. Remember. Giant or not; you’re extraordinary.”

Spike had no bloody idea what that was about, but it brought tears to his Niblet’s eyes. “Thanks. I think you are too.”

“Yeah, well. You know. Takes one to know one.”

With a sniffle, Dawn waved a farewell to the Slayers who’d come out to see them off, then opened the back hatch of the coach and squeezed inside to crawl up along the center of the thing. They’d rigged up a few mattresses for her to lie on in there during the trip, and she’d wadded up some of her ‘clothes’ to do for a pillow. She’d be spending several hours, after all, in a prone position, probably reading or what-have-you. Long bloody journey for her, the several days it would take to cross Europe. Two days for a normal trek, but since most of it would be spent heading into the east, Spike would only be driving nights and evenings, and they’d be spending much of the mornings through about early afternoons having a kip. Would draw things out a bit. 

Buffy had turned to Satsu, squaring her shoulders over the last bit. It was going to be rough on his Slayer, this whole business. She’d needed a lot of loving last night, facing this. She still felt a bit of the deserter, he knew, leaving behind something that smacked so greatly of duty and all that rot; as much as she hated leaving behind a friend she felt was in need. Xander, though, was hopefully taken care of, whereas the chits… But in the end what it came to was, Buffy felt was doing by far a greater duty to them by leaving. It was why she’d chosen to go. So here she was, in the light of morning—or, rather, afternoon—facing her replacement with as much of a clear conscience as she could muster. “You’ve got this, Satsu. You’re gonna make an excellent leader.”

The Japanese chit turned her face away, looking pained. “I’ll try, ma’am.” But it was clear by the way her features were twisting that she was at the verge of tears.

“Hey.” Buffy dropped her voice in a way that could not but help to encourage the bird. “You know why I need to leave, right? Me being here is causing too much trouble for the Organization. I’m doing this so everyone can stay on task. So the Slayers can stay whole, and no one has to question who they are.”

Dark eyes rose to meet green. “Why leave? Why not just…” A quick shake of the head, and fierce eyes darted to Spike. Away. “Why are you…” And the words cut off, the pained gaze closing.

“With him?”

It came out in a whisper. “Yes.”

Buffy smiled slightly, in that way that would have started Spike’s heart beating again, if that were at all possible. “So that _I_ can stay whole, and I don’t have to question who I am.”

/Sodding God; that I can do that for you, Buffy…/

The Satsu bird looked devastated to hear it. “He… does that? For you?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” Satsu stepped back, fading into the stonework, almost, of the castle. Buffy looked regretful, but it was what it was. 

Buffy lifted her gaze to meet those of her girls; the ones who had come to see her off. Nodded to Rowena, Renee. “See you later. If you need me, Xander has my number.”

The two Scots birds lifted their hands. “Drive safe, General,” Rowena called, on the tail of the much jauntier, “See you later, boss,” from Renee.

“Bye, Xan.”

“Bye, Buff.”

Buffy nodded at Spike where he stood in the shadow of the bus. He nodded back. “Right then?”

“Alright.”

He stepped up. Caught her hand to help her in. Not that she needed it, but sometimes his breeding just clawed its way to the surface around her in spite of himself. She threw him a faintly amused look as she passed him, heading into the cab, and looked around at the foiled-in windows with a satisfied expression. “You sure this is enough?”

“Yeah. Nice of Harris to lend me his welding goggles, yeah?” He snapped them onto his face and grinned widely, aware he looked ridiculous.

Buffy sounded tolerantly amused as she replied. “Not sure it counts as a loan if he might never get ‘em back, but yeah.” And frowned a little. “Hardly seems fair that you have to do all the driving. I really should learn to get better at that.”

That earned her a guffaw, and he firmly took the seat before she could get any funny ideas. Felt a twinge from the bullets sloshing about inside him, giving him a bit of a cramp. Ignored them as he had been the last couple of days to look up at her. “Buffy, no bloody offense, but you’re bad enough at this in your home country. No way in hell I’m setting you loose on the British thoroughfare! No fear! You’d kill everyone in sight just trying to figure out which side of the bleedin’ road to drive on.”

From a few feet away and floor-level, Dawn choked on a laugh. Buffy threw her a poisonous look. “I’m really not _that_ bad.”

“Buffy. _I_ drive better than you, and I don’t have a license.”

Buffy shot her sister a thoughtful glance as he put the behemoth into gear, caught hold of the nearby strut to keep her balance as Spike began backing away from the castle. “Seriously, we should look into that. Why haven’t we taken care of that? I mean, I’m just kind of condemning you to end up like me, aren’t I?”

Slowing in mid-reverse, Spike narrowed his gaze at his Slayer through the dark goggles. “Wait; why the bloody hell didn’t you get the Niblet driving lessons, Buffy?”

“Well,” Dawn defended her sister, “the classes are stupid expensive. And Sunnydale was small. And then our town blew up. And then, you know, Italy. Which has completely different rules, and the test is totally in another language. And then I was _going_ to do it in college, but then, you know, _giant_ , so…”

He slewed around in the seat to point at the girl on the floor. “Sodding hell. You. Me. Driving lessons. Soon as bleeding possible, the second you’re of a right size to get behind the bloody wheel. Got that, Niblet?” And turning back to the business with the mirrors and that, he settled in to navigate them over the uneven ground that led to the long road out to Barrhead.

“Oh, God,” Buffy muttered. “It’ll be like taking driving lessons from Dale Earnhardt…”

He swung the wheel hard to bring the bus round facing the correct direction. Put the thing into first gear. “Oi. I can drive circles around any of those gits. And any road, I’m not always a maniac, Buffy.”

“Oh, really.”

“Yeah, it depends on the music.” And, lifting a CD pointedly at her, he shoved it in the player suspended beneath the dash of the monster; below the much older radio. A more recent addition, added by an interim owner. 

Blessed, bright electric guitar crackled over the shitty speakers of the coach. And the Stooges came to life, clear as if it were still 1969, to tell the world what it was like.

“‘I wanna be your dog’?” Buffy asked, eyebrow lifted.

“Brilliant.”

“Oh, God, it’s going to be a long trip.”

***  
  
  
  
  
  
  
And we're off on the next stage of the journey.  
  
(Bet you thought this story was going to end with fighting the Scourge, huh?   
Suuuurrrrpriiiiiiiiise!!!! This thing is not NEARLY done. I have my clever reasons.)  
  
I promise, the next chapter at least is somewhat more manageable, length-wise.  
  
*Quote by Thomas Paine


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one starts out with some damnably painful stuff... and then edges into some deep conversation... and then ends with something almost akin to fluff before we finish the better part of our Road Trip (leg 1 of 4 or 5, depending on how you calculate your legs)...
> 
> Until one of y'all mentioned that this was a road trip I was blissfully unaware that this was the trope I had fallen into, because I'm a goob.
> 
> Seriously. The whole rest of the damn story, practically, is spent on the road, and I had no clue I'd written a road trip. 
> 
> GOOB.

The bullets worked their way out of him on their second day out, when they were in the middle of Poland, between approximately Poznan and Konin, kipping on the side of the road to avoid the morning sun. It was bloody demoralizing to lie there, sweating like a dog and groaning like that, while the women he was supposed to be giving safe passage hovered over him like a couple of nursemaids and told him it would be alright, he just had to push them out, it would be fine, like he was giving bleeding birth or some sodding thing. 

Worst part was, he’d felt the fucking things coming on, prodding about underneath his skin all throughout the last few days. Felt them pushing to come out all yesterday; crossing the UK, the Chunnel, into Belgium. He had held the fucking things off all the way through Germany; but now, here he was, on the floor like a sod, gritting his teeth and cursing every maker of every gun since the Chinese. Gits, all of them. 

They weren’t going to get this coach back in one piece to the bloody church or football team or god alone knew who the damn Slayer Organization had rented the thing from. He was going to leave it to them covered in fucking blood, wasn’t he. Sodding bullets. 

It had been perfect too, with its covered-over side-windows and the rest. But the rental was only supposed to be for the fortnight or so they’d need it, and it was supposed to go back as-is, not reeking with bits of offal and dented from him having kicked the thing to death in the bleeding throes. 

What would they say when someone from the Organization drove the thing back from wherever they left off? Their promise of a generous donation had been cheaper by far than buying one, but he doubted whatever group had loaned it out expected to get it back in _this_ state.

Course, the ladies were doing their best. Dawn had his legs, sod it all, was holding them still in her oversized mitts as if he was on a rack, while Buffy cradled his head in her lap and gripped his left hand, a soothing palm caressing his forehead. “I’ve got you. After this, I’ll feed you and you’ll be fine.”

“Fuck…” He’d only ever passed one bullet at a time before this, and it had, in their parlance, heartily sucked. Two at once was pushing it. 

So far he’d already done three, and he’d possibly prefer to dust before having to manage the other four.

The third one had come out his fucking _groin_. Just two inches to the left and he’d no longer have the equipment to serve Buffy at all anymore. Christ, that had fucking hurt. The first two had been one thing; one out the back, up near where his lungs more or less still accomplished the occasional task. Fine and good. That would heal. Another, down somewhere in the vicinity of where a spleen might once have rested. But that third one. Jesus fuck, he was scared to death what might happen with the rest, after that. And, from the pale, set cast of Buffy’s face, he was certain he wasn’t alone in his fears. 

“Oh, Christfuck…” He writhed, because there was another coming on, pressing out of his abdomen; there in the back, just above his pelvis where the kidneys had once lived, and if he was human he’d be pissing blood for the length of his days. Somewhere from far away, he felt Buffy bearing down on his hand, giving him something to crush, and Dawn was holding his legs still as he fought to escape his body, because bloody, bloody fuuuck, it was scraping all along the iliac crest, dragging hard on the bone as it slid up along, found an exit… punched loose…

Breath exploded from him in a long, keening cry that no longer even embarrassed him as the sodding thing slithered out with a tiny _pop_ , and landed on the hard, metal floor of the bus with a dull _ting!_

“Four,” Buffy chanted, sounding both relieved and horrified as she loosed her hold on his hand. Caressed his hair gently. “Remind me never to let you get shot again.”

“How many are there?” Dawn asked in a shaky voice. She sounded traumatized just watching this. Christ. 

“Three more,” Buffy whispered bleakly.

“Oh, man…”

“Two,” Spike gritted, and rolled hard over, feeling one coming up on his right side where it had been pressed to the unforgiving steel of the floor. Out between two sodding ribs, the bastard, just like the lung one. Of _course_ it would, because why not grate between _two_ bones on its way through, and tear up a bunch of sodding connective tissue while it was at it, fuck, fuck, _fuck_ …

The last two were the worst only by virtue of his having reached the end of his tolerance. He’d been tortured before, obviously, and by some fine artists. But there was a limit. And the thing was, there was torture for fun, when someone danced on your line and then stepped back, and then there was the sort of torture where your limit was exceeded constantly and consistently, but there was no escape, so that your body and mind were overwhelmed. This was the kind of fucking thing _Angelus_ had used to do. He’d never thought a bloody bullet or six could beat _that_ bastard out for ingenuity, but maybe someday he ought to tell Angel he’d been surpassed by an inanimate object. 

It was the groin one that had put him over the edge. Broken him. Everything after that was just holding himself together to keep from falling apart. All a bloody show, though, so his women wouldn’t think him a complete git. Mostly, he was a loss. The one that tried to come out from under his shoulder blade had been bad enough, scraping along underneath the bone for ages before it found its way to flesh, and making him writhe and fang out and bite down on his own tongue to keep from screaming. 

But the bloody _piece de resistance_ had been the last one. Right the fuck through his neck, exactly where a person liked best to be bitten. That one had felt like dying. Like the exact opposite of everything wonderful in life; like a mate-bite turned inside out. He’d be shaking over that one for weeks. Months, maybe. Fucking Christ. 

He laid there, face down in Buffy’s lap, shuddering and fighting not to sob, striving to keep his dignity in front of them, but he really didn’t have all that much left in him. Her warm hands stroked him; a long, slow metronome of comfort, but he was near broken. Needed to fall apart, and…

“Dawn, can you go outside for a minute?”

“Yeah.” Dawn sounded shaky, and more than willing to leave. “I… need some air anyway.”

The light from the opening and closing of the gate at the rear of the bus came all too close to touching his boots, but he didn’t move, didn’t flinch as it creaked open and shut, and the bus sank, rose again with her departure. He just lay there, half dead and trembling. And then Buffy was speaking, her hand never ceasing in its regular caress. “I’m so sorry, Spike.” 

He couldn’t be, obviously. If it was a choice between that and her life, he could never be. But… Bleeding _fuck_. 

“Can you eat right now?”

He shook his head a little. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t want anything but just… to be held. He was a complete tosser, but…

She pulled him closer. Wrapped her arms around him. And held him tightly to her. Even rocked him a little. “You’re allowed to fall apart. That was awful. Beyond awful. I don’t even have words for that.”

He shook harder. It was almost permission, but… To let go in front of Buffy…

“This is the second time you’ve let yourself be tortured because you’d rather that than see me hurt.”

“Can’t…” His voice sounded thick to his own ears. “Never…”

Her lips were warm when they landed above the spot where the last bullet had slipped loose; just above the cringing flesh around his siring mark, now torn forever from him. Her breath warmed the chill, wet cloth of his tee, soaked with blood. And she kissed him there, so gently that he thought he might completely disintegrate. “I love you.”

She pulled him into her breast, when he finally wept, and he didn’t feel nearly as much of a git as he thought he might, that he let himself fall apart. Because she wanted him to. Because she’d already absolved him. And her long, slow strokes along his back seemed to smooth the agony from his body. From his demon and his soul.

***

“Remind me never to have a baby,” Dawn called out the request some time later as she laid on her back on her mattresses, book held above her head. It was time to get on, Spike supposed, though he didn’t particularly want to start. Didn’t particularly want to leave the warm circle of Buffy’s arms at all.

Sun was receding behind the bus, though, and it was time. “Human body’s _meant_ to push out a whelp, time or two,” he pointed out blandly. “No one’s meant to push out a bullet. They’re meant to go _in_ , yeah?” And his fingers slid up, slow and grateful, along the inside of Buffy’s right thigh, where the femoral artery pulsed in slow time to her heart. She let out a low hiss and stretched sensuously at the spark of sensation from the new bite just there, and the fecund scent of her arousal filled the cabin. Christ, maybe Dawn could go outside again for a bit and he could give it another go.

“No, I think Dawn has the right idea,” Buffy murmured, catching his hand firmly and lifting it away with a faintly repressive sort of glance, though she paired it with a salving kiss to the knuckles. “First you have to do all that… and then you have to take care of the baby, which sounds like a completely dangerous and really tiring idea.”

Dawn rolled her eyes over her book, her huge thumbs covering probably half the pages. “Did you even keep your egg ‘alive’ in high school?”

Buffy’s eyes came afire. “Okay, you know what? That’s not a fair test! Our eggs were demon eggs, and they hatched and tried to possess everyone! I had to kill them on _purpose!”_

“Bloody hellmouth,” Spike muttered, and, forcing his game face away, pushed himself up on his hands. It was easy enough to bid the fangs and all farewell, considering the faint, anxious flutter within him as the unsettling conversation progressed. Buffy honestly sounded resigned to never having children. Possibly even grateful, but he still sometimes wondered if Angel was right, and he was cheating her, somehow, with this relationship…

Her eyes caught his, narrowed. “No one has time for that kind of thing, anyway,” she muttered fiercely; the words purportedly for Dawn, but the undertone for him. “You can have the kids, okay, Dawnie? We’ll visit and play with them, and leave them mostly safe, if we keep it short.”

Dawn made a scoffing noise. “I already said I’m never gonna do that. Ugh.” The paperback dropped to the overgrown chest. “Besides, if I keep going like you, I’m gonna end up marrying some demon guy anyway, and we probably won’t be genetically compatible.”

Spike grunted, shoving himself reluctantly to his feet. “You’d be surprised,” he muttered, and held out his hand for Buffy. “Very few species aren’t, actually, as long as they’re from this dimension and have the same number of arms and legs.” /Only you won the lottery, Buffy, the one you keep picking./

Buffy rolled her eyes at him, her expression telling him very plainly that she didn’t care a whit. “Dawn, if you get pregnant by anyone, demon or human, before you’re my age—at _least_ —I’ll kill you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Are we _leaving?”_

“Yeah.” Shaking it off for the nonce, Spike moved to settle himself behind the wheel. “Off we go. Latvia and the lot.”  
  
"I'll get you a clean shirt," Buffy murmured to him, and headed back a few seats to locate his suitcase.

Moments later he was safely accoutered in dry kit, his blood-soaked tee hung over the back of one vinyl-covered seat to air-dry, that it might at some point be folded up and set aside with other dirtied items, and be laundered at a later date. And people wondered why he tended to stick to black. “It’s really pretty out here,” Dawn commented as he pulled into gear and headed back for the highway. 

“Eastern Europe has its charms,” Spike agreed, and reached for his driving goggles.

“We should just tour around, instead of all this ‘send Dawn back to college’ crap. Probably a lot more educational.”

“Dawn…” Buffy warned as she returned to take up her seat opposite Spike and one behind.

“Jeez. What a buzzkill.” Heaving a heavy sigh, Niblet buried herself back in her book.

As they bounced over the last rut and swerved onto the pavement, Spike moved to pick out a CD for the drive. And was arrested by a warm hand. “I seriously don’t care,” Buffy told him softly. She had moved into the seat just behind his, was leaning around a bit so he could read her face did he need to. “I mean it. I don’t even think I want it.”

He froze, eyes locked on the driving slit and the road in front of him. Let out a hissing little breath. “I know your life is complicated and violent now, but you’re uncomplicating it, Buffy. Someday you might want…”

“ _You’re_ uncomplicating it,” she pointed out bluntly. “Without you it’d be pretty much the same as it always was. And besides.” She made a twisted face he could hear in her voice. “I doubt the violence is gonna go anywhere, complicated or not. I am what I am, and I’ve finally given up thinking that’s ever gonna change. I’ve had to, to stay sane. So why should I start thinking about things that don’t make sense? I mean…” With a sigh, she leaned back a bit at her station. He caught, from the corner of his eye, the flash of her elbow as she finger-combed her hair, reset her elastic. “You told me once that Nikki Wood died because of Robin. Because she was torn in two. Because she got tired, made a choice.” 

He could cut his tongue out.

“I have a hard enough time with just Dawn, and my friends. Killing Angel, losing you, choosing between her or me. A part of me, made from me, just like if I ever…” 

Christ; he’d never truly thought of the Niblet that way. But it was true, he supposed. Sister or no, she was in so many ways also Buffy’s child. She even remembered helping to raise the Bit, false memories or no. So in that way… she already had one. 

What a mindfuck.

“Facing that…” Buffy murmured, and he glanced back, something inside him twisting, hearing the reflected pain in her voice. “I don’t think I could do it. I’d rather not have to even think about it.” Her tones were quiet, set, firm… and with no gentle lie in to be read in her voice as he watched the road. “I don’t want it, Spike. Honestly. I’m… glad.”

He let out the breath he’d held since the conversation had begun. “Alright.” 

Another thing Peaches had been wrong about, then. But, then, he supposed his grandsire had only really known the Slayer in another life; one when she’d still been fighting for something called ‘normal’. And, Spike supposed, she had long since accepted who and what she was, and what she would never be. He’d met her in the middle of the conflict between identities; taken on himself some of the violence of that inner war. But now, all that was gone. And he saw before him a placid, self-contained woman, brimming with the harvest of _temet nosce._

Maybe he had even helped with that. It was a nice thing to consider.

“What about you?”

/Huh?/ “What about me what?”

Buffy shrugged, voice turning abruptly diffident. “You said… Back when we were in Hell-A, and Connor… You said if you ever had a child…”

It took him a moment to catch up to what the bloody hell she was talking about. Once he did, though… /Oh Christ./ “I was just thinking about it from Peaches’ perspective, pet. What that must be like, yeah?” He forced a shrug, though Buffy would see right through it. She’d know he cared far more than he might like to admit. “Know how different it is for him than it was raising me to be a right little Aurelian. Can see it in his eyes, how different, even if I couldn’t just from how differently he treats the little git. So even though I’m not really the lad’s brother, guess I’ll always have that middle child problem with him. Actin’ up, tryin’ to get the same attention Peaches gave his overachievin’ firstborn, or his favorite daughter, or his baby, even if what I get’s the wrong kind, knowin’ to him I’ll always be little more’n a minion.”

“Wait; Drusilla wasn’t his first…”

Spike felt his mouth twist. “No. Some sod named Penn. Twisted Puritan or summat. He was long gone before Dru ever came into the picture, but Angelus always talked about the berk like he was somethin’ to live up to. Like I was a massive soddin’ disappointment next to the prick. Just made me behave worse, tryin’ to get his approval, hearin’ about some other git; like a ghost I couldn’t compare to.” Spike shot her a faint smirk, let it fade at her troubled expression. “Didn’t mean to worry you, Buffy. I wasn’t fussing about the experience for myself, so much.” He turned back to the road, hunched over the wheel. “Never been an option for me. Likely wasn’t even when I was human. Wrote it off ages ago, yeah?”

Buffy drew closer, touched the back of his neck. “You’re great at adopting strays.”

“Yeah, well… maybe I like to give ‘em what I didn’t get.”

“I can see that.” Regret ached in her tones for him. Dammitall. “And you don’t feel like I’m taking something away from you if I never…”

His head jerked around, stunned amazement blooming inside him. “Christ, Buffy, I’d never want you to do something you don’t want to, just for me.” He firmed up his tones, let her hear the certainty there, because she had to know, had to understand this, if nothing else. “And no. I’m built to… raise a child an entirely other way, yeah?” She scarcely had a window as to what that was all about, considering her concept of it was all awry from the idiocy that had gone on in that bloody shitehole of a hellmouth, on top of everything. Not that he wanted it, really, but she had to know that in most other places it was an entirely other sort of thing, whether he wanted it or no. A wholly separate and dissimilar drive than the one to which she was referring. 

Dragging his gaze back to the thoroughfare, he softened his tones. “As to the other… I’d do it, a’ course, did you decide you wanted it. Stand right by your side; you know that, right?”

“I know it.” Her quiet response left no room for equivocation. He risked another brief glance at her face, saw placid acceptance there, but no hunger, no pain, no look of loss in her eyes. 

She ought to know he felt the same. “…But if I were to…” He jerked his head again in negation as he turned back to the unspooling tarmac. “I’m a vampire, yeah? I wanted that experience, it’d be as a vampire. I’d want to tread properly over the ground I’d traveled. Take it back for myself. Do it right; what was done wrong for me. See if…” Something twisted inside him. He felt it touch his face. Wondered if she could see it there; the pain and longing. “If maybe how you raise ‘em might change… how they turn out.” Inside him, the part of him was a demon growled, restless; either from the suggestion that he might someday sire new get, or out of protest of his nancy aims. It unsettled him to think the latter, should his inner monster think it so unlikely a goal. “Bit of a gamble, though, and I don’t think I could handle it if…”

Buffy’s hand squeezed his shoulder. “I would never want to do that to you.”

He clicked his tongue against his teeth; once. Hard. “Wouldn’t be yours to do. Sire manages his childe. Fledge doesn’t do what the sire says, that fledge is dust. End of.”

Buffy’s voice went tight; startled, and a little pained on his behalf. “That’s how it works?”

“It is.” He let his unequivocal tones speak for themselves. Felt her flinch, knew he had to expound a bit. “You’ve seen ‘em, Buffy,” he told her grimly. “Fledges without any training, without any discipline? Worth nothing but a stake. They need a solid nest and some leadership to come to anything. The fact that I wasn’t there to take on the ones I made that last year was…”

“Not your fault.”

Her quick words were an intellectual absolution, but they did nothing for the part of him that would do it right, proper; had always wanted to do it so… and had failed. 

Silence fell between them for a long moment, then, “I’m sorry that… it’s always come out so wrong for you. From the first time, till… last year. That must be…” Words clearly failed her.

His hand slipped up, and he caught the warm one on his shoulder, grateful for her understanding. “‘Preciate it, pet. But maybe some of us are meant to be childless, yeah, and take part in raisin’ the ones as need us as they come along.” /Interdimensional keys and the like, innit?/ No need to tell Buffy he felt right parental of the Bit, when he didn't feel like a harried elder brother.

He heard Buffy's slow intake of breath. Felt her agreement, and the little wafting of peace that seemed to settle between them on their shared blood. “Yeah. I… think so.”

They drove for some time in silence, both lost in their own thoughts. Spike was fighting to put paid to memories of the dozens of shite minions Dru had made over the decades that he’d had to end, over and over again because his Dark Princess had been such a ruddy awful sire. Not that it had been her fault, really. Because whether he’d wanted to admit it or not, and no matter how dedicated he’d been to her care and feeding, her every whim, he’d resented having to clean up her messes, take on her jobs... /Pick up her parenting. Though that was a bit of taking them as they came, so I guess I did do it, sort of./ Probably part of his problem, since he rather felt he’d done a shite job of it, the way most of the gits had turned out. But then, he just really hadn’t felt like nesting with those blokes, for one. 

The sort Dru had turned had never honestly been his type. When it came to blokes—and it did, on occasion—he preferred an entirely other cast than his sire had. Too bloody many of the gits had leant toward tall, dark, and useless.   
  
And, well… Dru hadn’t ever sired any chits, so that left him right out when it came to the rest. /Probably she done that on purpose, keep me from strayin’. Not that I would’ve, less we were all playin’ together, but still; made the nestin’ a bit uncomfortable, yeah? And… Bloody hell. Was that how Angelus felt about me? Was that why he made me his great guilty work of art? Because he felt about me the way I felt about Dru’s shite sodding minions? Like I was a terrible bore, but a duty, and he’d make something of me or dust trying?/

Christ, what a thought.

When Buffy spoke again, it dragged him directly out of his thoughts like a dash of cold water. “Are you really okay? You didn’t take much, earlier.”

He shook himself like a dog coming up out of a river, in an attempt to join her conversational track. “What’s that, pet?”

“I thought you’d need more, when you fed. After all that.”

“Oh.” He frowned at the slit of window in a kind of self-flagellating frustration. “I probably will. But right then I just couldn’t seem to focus.”

She stood, her balance perfect as she drew closer to him, laid a hand on his shoulder once more. “Are you still hurting?”

/Not physically, no./ “It… didn’t seem right. I don’t like just… feeding from you, when I can’t give you what you deserve. Not right enough in the head right now to do it proper.”

He heard a faint smile in her voice. “You got the job done, Spike, don’t worry. It was fine.”

/No, it bloody well was not. I was distracted, dammit, Buffy, and it was mostly you takin’ care of me, which…/

Her hand descended to stroke his head, lovingly. He wanted to flinch away, but he had to mind the road. “Never thought you of all people would ever have performance anxiety.”

He clenched his hands a bit harder on the wheel. “Shouldn’t ought to mock, luv. I’ve a standard to keep. Rather stop at a bloody hospital or a funeral home than leave you wantin’.” He’d been avoiding bringing it up, but they both knew it was true, so no point putting it off any longer. “Gonna have to at some point anyway, considering between this, and the blood loss when I was first shot and that…” The small sup he’d had from behind the hospital in Paisley hadn’t done much to supplement all he’d lost. He was on the downhill slide again. “Can’t keep taking just from you forever.” Not that he felt he ought to be Superman—or uber-vamp, as Buffy would no doubt put it—but he didn’t much like slowly starving, either. Reminded him too sodding much of his first painful, dry days under the cruel, iron fist of the Initiative chip. 

Those first few days back in their home dimension, before the gunshots had drained him back to naught, had been like nothing else he had ever experienced. Well-fed, with human blood as a base instead of animal, and constant infusions Slayer blood on top of it, he’d felt like some sort of sodding ur-vampire or something; stronger than he’d ever been in his long unlife. Faster, keener, cleverer… And somehow more at peace, too, than he could have possibly imagined before now. /Because I’m mated. Christ, to know this is.../ It was beyond anything he’d ever dreamed.   
  
But it took being fed, as well. And yeah, he’d prefer the base to be human, if at all possible. Hospital was better than nothing, even if the preservatives and the centrifuges and the rest tended to kill half the life in the shite. He supposed he’d still do on deader’s leavings or butcher’s garbage, if he had Buffy to keep him in sound condition otherwise, but he’d always know what it would feel like to exist at that shining pinnacle. After that, everything else would be…

Buffy sighed and dropped her hand away, her voice edging into something that sounded deeply uncomfortable. “I know after…” She had agreed readily enough after the battle, of course. They hadn’t had much choice, then. She sounded, and felt to him, remarkably reluctant, now, however. “I really don’t want you to go back to that. To bagging it. Not even from hospitals, unless we’re desperate.”

His shoulders hunched, because she knew as well as he did how the math worked. “You know what you’re saying, Buffy?”

Her voice was exceedingly quiet now. “Yeah, I do.”

/Bloody fuck. Free range Spike, is it?/ “But… what I did there, I did because there was no alternative, and everyone was in the know. Here, there is…”

When she spoke again, her voice sounded shockingly raw to him. “Maybe I’ve gotten used to your libido, and how warm you get, and how relaxed you are when you aren’t fighting for your life navigating all this crap trying just to find the right way to stay alive. Maybe I like it better when there’s not that layer standing between us of Slayer and vampire; when we can just be us.” Surprised, he glanced back swiftly, saw her shrug a little, as if she thought he might judge her or summat. “Maybe I’m a bad Slayer now,” she went on quietly. “It’s one of the reasons I decided to step back. Take a page out of Faith’s book, back out of the limelight. Just be apocalypse girl. Because I just honestly don’t know where I stand anymore on that line. Where my priorities are. I mean… I _do_. No one should die. But beyond that…”

She needed to stop. “Buffy, stepping back from leading them doesn’t mean you’re not a Slayer anymore, and it sure the hell doesn’t mean you’ve got to forswear everything you’ve stood for since…”

Her eyes snapped up to his, blazing. Drew his gaze from the road again for a brief, locked instant before he tore them away to watch the tarmac. Not that she could probably see his eyes through the stupid goggles, but he kept them darting back to her, riveted by the expression there, because he had never quite seen her like this. He’d seen her blazing. Furiously hard. Set. Bleak. But never this determined, this, just fucking _done_. “I’ve saved the world for them I don’t know how many times," she informed him harshly. "Died for them twice—three times, if you count that idiot Warren—and here I am, still doing the job, at least in my mind. Toeing their line, even though I was supposed to have freed myself from the wheel of their ‘get a Calling, die young, make a new Slayer to do the same’ gig. I’ve died enough to be free. Been replaced more than once. Done my _time_.” She sounded like she was almost arguing with herself. “There’re hundreds of Slayers now. I think I’ve _earned_ my freedom, and a chance to live my damn life; with you. To make it work, however we need to.”

He got that, but the problem was… There was a difference between casting off a role, and throwing away an identity. “You and the other chit are the Slayers emeritus,” he agreed carefully. “And for all of me you owe the bastards jack shit.” He caught her eye briefly, gripping the wheel hard. “Buffy, seeing you let the burden of it continually wear you down into a shadow of yourself… it’s tough to watch. But…” /Go gently here, me lad./ “I also don’t want to be the reason you betray everything you swore to protect.” 

She snorted derisively. “I don’t see you killing anyone. I think that pretty much takes you off the list of ‘demons the Slayer needs to work over’.”

He smirked a little at that. “Oh, I’m a demon you need to work over, pet; just not so long as there’s a stake involved.” He quietened then. “So what is it you want me to do, Buffy? Because I don’t quite see you comin’ with me to the suckhouses.” Everything in him rebelled, of course, at the very thought. He wasn’t sure what part of the idea repulsed more; the thought of going back into one of those disgusting prostitutes’ dens like a desperate gobshite, or Buffy seeing it and knowing…

She winced audibly. “I would, if you needed me to. But…” And he caught the uncomfortable shrug out of his periphery. “I don’t really want you to have to… I dunno. Stoop so low. Even though I know it’s a good economy, and no one’s really getting hurt…”

He didn’t mind admitting it made his heart soar a bit, knowing she didn’t want that for him. Still, he was, at this point, utterly nonplussed. “So then, what is it, luv?”

She hesitated, then sat back down behind him; a heavy, surrendering sort of gesture. “I don’t know. I haven’t really thought my way through this. I mean, I know, here no one owes you anything, and they don’t know what you are; so it’ll be harder. I guess, if you’re hungry now…” She sighed and leaned back, her head against the low back of the seat. “I mean, we can supplement however works, on the fly, depending on circumstances. Hospitals, suckhouses, whatever. But.” Her eyes rose then, to the overhead mirror, full in the awareness that whether she could see him there or not, he would meet her gaze. And what he saw there was calm and uncompromising. “I could go with you. To clubs or whatever. Maybe we can…” 

If her eyes were unshaken, her voice was less certain. Moreso when she halted midsentence; clearly unable to quite force the words out. He could read it all in her face, though, read the battle there. ‘I may be ready to retire, but I’m still the Slayer,’ it said. ‘I’m still _me_. I don’t know if I can… _trick_ people into…’

Spike yanked the bus over to the side of the road, out of traffic, and jerked it to a halt. Behind them, Dawn exclaimed in protest, but they both ignored her. “Bugger that!” Spike burst out before Buffy could muster up the courage to say something she could never take back. “You were about to say some bloody thing about luring people into what they think’ll be a threesome or some such nonsense, and then lettin’ me have ‘em while you slip away, yeah?” And oh, hell, Dawn was listening to this, wasn’t she? But Christ, too late to censor the thing now.

Buffy didn’t look at Dawn. Didn’t look at him, now that he had rounded on her in shock. She merely shivered and glanced away, unable to meet his eyes.

/Oh, bloody, bloody…/ “That’s bollocks. Buffy, I know you want me to be healthy, and to be me, but you’ve got to know I need you to stay _you_ , too!” He tore off the goggles, made a grab for her hand on the vertical bar, tugged her close. She came, and he caught her chin, tugged her face around so that she was forced to meet his gaze. Lowered his voice intently, hoping to Christ Dawn couldn’t hear the rest of their conversation. “I’ll stand in line with the other sods for deader blood at the fucking mortuary. It’s not the best, but it’s still better than dead and pig, bein’ human. If we can afford it, I’ll bag it at the hospitals. And if you want me to be hot for you some night I’ll find a willing donor. I know where to go for that. I’m not so shite I’ve lost all my instincts, either. But you won’t be bleedin’ involved!” 

The tears welled in that beloved jade gaze, and her face twisted a little. “It’s not… I want you to know how much I don’t care. How much I trust you. How much I want you to be okay. I want to support you the way you support me…”

She was a sodding idiot. And he loved her. But she needed to stop. “Oh, Christ, Buffy, you do. But never to the point that you compromise everything that you are, yeah? There’s a _line_. A line that will always exist between us, because you are what you are and I am what I am. It’s always gonna be there, whether we like it or not, and pretendin’ it away isn’t gonna change that.” His voice shook with low, growled passion. “I won’t have you destroyin’ yourself over it just to show me thing’s’ve changed between us…”

His reaction seemed to utterly infuriate her. “Why _not?”_ she shot back, livid in every line of her. “You were willing to destroy yourself to be with me. To _kill_ a part of yourself! Whether that actually happened isn’t the point, because you didn’t _know!_ You _thought_ it would, and you went out there and you did it _anyway!_ And look what you just went _through_ for me!” She flung her hand out toward the floor of the bus behind her; still stained with spots of dried blood, one of the seat-struts bent from a fierce kick made by tormented feet. “And _besides!_ You won’t be killing anyone, so why should I care, or get all Slayer-y about a few sips here and…”

He threw the goggles onto the instrument panel, pushed utterly beyond his limits and all too aware that Dawn was still watching them with, at this point, probably naked concern. “Oh, bloody hell. You listen to me, you stubborn madwoman. The problem is, you _do_ care, and you always will. And I don’t want this to come between us; _ever_. Just knowin’ you’ve come far enough that you want me to live to the best of my ability as a vamp and not a soddin’ animal in a cage is enough for me. You want me to actually _live;_ and you still want me with you while I do it, and that’s a bloody revelation.” He reached out, tentatively caressed her cheek. “But you don’t need to bleedin’ _see_ it—not out here; not anymore—much less be a party to makin’ it happen. I don’t need you to sodding _recruit_ for me!”

“I did _there!_ We’re a damn _team_ , Spike! I thought…”

He couldn’t hear this anymore. Did she think he wasn’t fucking _capable?_

Shoving himself to his feet, he stepped closer, formidable and in her space. “Not _here_ , Buffy,” he interrupted, low and firm. “Not _especially_ here, in _your_ world, where everyone’s someone you’ve sworn to protect with your life’s blood.”

She gave in with a suddenness profound in its helpless regret. “I wanted to be… better for you here than I was before.” Her tones were sunk in some heavy, self-accusing misery. “I thought if I just closed my eyes, maybe I…” 

“Oh, dammit, Buffy.” Pulling her roughly into his arms, he wrapped them tight around her, so that her hair was woven between his forearms and her face was pressed tight into his neck. “This is so much better. _We_ are so much better. Christ, you have no idea. But we have to make it work, here in the real world. Don’t you see that? We _have_ to, or I can’t go on. I can’t lose you. And not just to you leavin’. Can’t have you fadin’ away, either, because you’re tryin’ so bloody hard to do right by me that you tear yourself to bits.”

“I know we have to,” she whispered into his throat. “Because I can’t lose you, either. That’s what I’m trying to do. Trying to _keep_ you, this time; the _right_ way. Because if I lost you again…”

“You’re never gonna lose me, Buffy. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

Her laugh was half-sob, muffled against his skin. “I’m still working on that.”

On the floor behind them, he swore he could feel Dawn’s relief, redolent in the cab of the vehicle. “Work harder, you mad bint,” he whispered. Shook his head, smiling in spite of himself in something like relief, something like pain; and buried his face in the warm, living scent of her hair. “Bloke has to follow you about for four years, burn to ash, live like a monk and go through hell before he can even half-convince you…”

She shifted in his arms, and one finger rose underneath his embrace to poke him in his chest. “I wouldn’t throw stones.” But she did stay in his arms.

And when they stopped for the morning, outside Daugavpils in Latvia, Buffy was the one who went into the hospital and asked for the outdated bloodbags.

Relationships were all about compromise, yeah?

***

“Last leg, ladies.” He tilted his head to one side, waiting as Dawn clambered back into the rear of the coach. “Haven’t been to Russia since the ‘Cherry Orchard’ days. Maybe people are a little less miserable there by now.”

Buffy sent him a confused look from where she had resumed her reclining position in the front left-hand seat; which station he assumed she maintained largely to keep an eye on him. “Spike, what the heck are you talking about?”

He smirked. “Nothing, luv. You have enough existential angst of your own. Reading Chekov would drive you straight off your bird. Everyone afraid to make a single move…”

“Someday I’m going to be able to follow you all the way through one of our conversations.”

“I doubt it,” Dawn called cheerfully as she settled down with some Brit teenybopper magazine. “He talks like a professor sometimes. Or a Watcher.”

“Oi!” Shooting the chit a glare to turn her off, he grinned at Buffy in challenge. “Have to let me give you a reading list first, pet. Maybe you’ll catch up to Dawn yet.”

That earned him a glare. “I was in college once already, Spike. I don’t have time for it now.”

“I thought we agreed we’d make time for it once we got you back here. On the right track for it, yeah?”

She swiveled a bit to punch at her balled up jumpers and things, what she was using for a sort of a pillow, then settled back and rolled her eyes at him.

“Any road, you’re done writin’ up the new manual, innit?”

She did a pensive sort of frown. “More or less. I still need you to look over that last part about negotiating the sire-fledge thing, and the local politics deal, make sure I got it all down right…”

“And I will, pet. Next stop. Meantime, you have time now to read a bit while we’re on this trek, innit? Little sis has you beat all hollow.”

“I’m ever the more impressive sister.”

“Shut up, Dawn. What is this, improve Buffy week?”

Spike scoffed as he took his seat. “Like you fine just the way you are, Love. You’re the one whinging about missing the references.”

She glared at him through the next few roundabouts and off and on thereafter all the way to approximately Stropi, before she finally stuck a peremptory, very ink-stained hand. “Okay, give me a book. Might as well do something besides sit here.”

“Yeah?”

She faced straight forward, not quite frowning. “Yeah, why not.” 

Lifting a brow, he flung an arm behind him into the seat she had vacated, dug one-handed into his open suitcase, and pulled out a much-dog-eared paperback. An extremely slim one she might perhaps recognize, once she had a look. He handed it over without comment, and grinned when she blinked at the cover. “You can’t be serious.”

It was ‘The Call of the Wild’. “What? It’s a bloody classic.”

“Everyone reads this book in like the seventh grade or something. This one and, what’s the other one? ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ are like required reading in schools everywhere.”

He favored her with a sternly incisive glance. “Remember anything about ‘em?”

She had no answer to that. And really, the bint had no excuse, did she? For one, the damn thing was scarce a hundred pages, so she ought to stop whinging about it and simply humor him. If nothing else, it would pass the time.

With a tiny grunt of disdain, she scrunched down further in her bitty nest and opened the skinny little tome. And, he hoped, began to realize before too long why he had chosen that particular novel for her perusal. It might inform her as to some of her struggles with the whole question as to wolf-dogs and wolves and sheep and the like.

Maybe she might get on to the companion novel afterward, if she managed to evolve a taste for London’s prose, though ‘White Fang’ was a bit more slow-going an affair than this bitty thing. This one was far more apropos to her situation, though, so it was meet she read it first.

The other was more his affair, really. /Calm all the bloodthirsty instincts, domesticated by love and all that rot. And wouldn’t trade it for the world, if it means, after a life of cruel ones, feeling the willing touch of a gentle hand. /And you’ve become a maudlin creature, William the Bloody. If you ever were anything else./

Watching her become ever more absorbed in the book as he drove, her eyes riveted by the print, and hearing her sounds of surprised realization, he thought maybe he had never been meant to be anything but this. /Not least when it comes to her./

***  
  
  
  
  
  
(been dying to make that comparison for EVAR)


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a shorter chapter here, as we reintroduce Giles (carefully, cautiously)... We don't get into any nitty-gritty just yet. That waits till next week. But, then... we've a bit of catching up to do, haven't we?

**B:**

St. Petersburg was really gorgeous. Buffy had never actually made it to the city, having kind of left that whole thing up to Giles and Andrew, but it was just truly super lovely. It was full of all these really cool, onion-domed palace-things, some of them even multi-colored, and neat, pillared buildings sprawling over acres of land—though, why so many of them were that weird teal color was beyond her—and huge gardens full of sculptures, all situated on this gigantic inlet of the Baltic Sea like some kind of northern Venice or something. The air was different, of course; summer-muggy, but in a less ‘Mediterranean’ way; like you knew just from smelling it that you were a lot further away from things like deserts and dry plains, and closer to things like tundra or something, and like somehow winter just could never really be that far off. And, the water smelled more like silt and less like sand, or something. But, for God’s sake, the _palaces_.  
  
Buffy could really stand to do a little sight-seeing. /I bet the gold-leaf stuff in some of those places is just to-die-for. And I bet there's brocade curtains in all the windows, and…/

“While we’re here, can we get you right-sized, Dawn, we should take a boat tour. The nighttime ones are a hell of a thing. Lights on the water. Not to be missed. ‘Specially the one where you get out to see the Peterhof. All those bloody fountains and gold statues with the floodlights on ‘em, under the stars. Bleedin’ breathtaking.”

Buffy stared at her guy, feeling like she was getting to know this entirely other person; till he swiveled to stare back, looking hunted. “What?”

“Nothing. Just, sometimes I forget you’re this, you know, world-traveler who spent time… I dunno. _Seeing_ things.”

“Did more than eat people, Buffy,” he answered disdainfully, and caught her arm in a firm grip, tucked her fingers in the crook of his elbow as if she was some kind of debutante and he was escorting her around his own century. Apparently something about being in this part of the world was seriously bringing out his inner courtly gentleman. “Had a lot of fun, actually, for a lot of it. Saw some shows, had some wine, looked at the sights…” It was obvious by the almost snide way he was talking that he didn’t even notice he was doing it. 

Kind of jarring, actually, in juxtaposition. Was he uncomfortable? “Dinner and a show, maybe, later, but got a lot of culture in. No one knew us. Just a part and parcel of the world.”

/Oh./ He was. Because he had had that, and lost it. /And you’re really going to have to address that, someday. The way you isolated him, in Sunnydale./ “Yeah, I guess after all this, our little corner of the world was pretty… meh.” But she kept her eyes on his as she said it; a quiet apology.

He firmed his grip on her hand, seeing it. Then looked down, as if just now realizing how he was holding her arm. Blinked. Hesitated, clearly at a loss for whether to let go or what. She rolled her eyes at him, because at this point if he released her it would just look silly and reactionary. So he sighed and held on. And murmured, “Yeah, well… I was the one chose to stay in dear old Sunnyhell, and culture be damned. It had something that was nowhere in the whole sodding rest of the world. And nothin’ else I’d seen could ever compare, so…”

/Oh. Oh wow. You masochistic bastard./ God, it was scary sometimes, how much he’d loved her even then. What he’d put up with just to stay in her orbit. “I’d really like to see the world through your eyes, sometime, Spike,” she managed after a moment. “You know, now that we’ve finally blown Sunnydale off the map.”

He snorted. “Bleedin’ cathartic, that. Hell of a lot better than knockin’ down the roadsign.”

“Wait, that was _you?”_ Dawn’s demand was incredulous. “The city just kept talking about vandals…

He lifted his free hand, new nail-polish gleaming in the mellow old streetlights. “Vandal, here.”

Dawn looked him up and down, assessing, and with a new admiration. “See, if you don’t want me to crush on you, you really shouldn’t do cool things like that.”

“Oh, bloody hell.”

That little bit of repartee could go on for hours. And, well… the sun was going to come up sometime. So.  
  
Squaring her shoulders, Buffy faced the heavy double-doors of the pillared porch here at this huge, square palace of a building which quartered the Eastern European Slayer cell, and knocked. “You ready to do this?”   
  
"Faced Rupert down before. Can do it again.” Spike glanced back at Dawn. “Only problem’s gonna be getting the Niblet through the door.”

“Hey, I can get through that! And look at those windows. The inside of that first floor is ten feet, easy. I’m sure I can crouch down and make it inside before the sun comes up and people start to notice me.”

“Failing that, I’m sure they can find you a spot to kip somewhere on the grounds.” They were on the edge of the city, where the Organization had rented this huge place as another of their ‘restoration’ projects. It was kind of battered compared to the palaces inside the city grounds, but still pretty impressive. And because it was outside of town, it came with a decent acreage, which was helpful when you needed somewhere to store a giant sister.

The door opened. They were, after all, expected; or at least, Buffy and Dawn were. Spike, not so much. Buffy half-expected Courtney or one of the other Slayers, or maybe Andrew, on the other side. She wasn’t quite prepared, despite her own words, to see Giles himself standing on the other side. “Buffy! And, Good Lord, Dawn! You’re massive!”

He was so hung up on the whole giant thing that he hadn’t seen Spike yet, where he hovered off to Buffy’s left and a little behind said very large sister. Dawn, who was clearly in conspiracy-mode about springing the surprise, grinned broadly. “I know, that’s what people keep telling me. And then they never shut up about the whole sex with a thricewise thing…”

“Bloody mollusk,” Spike muttered. “Gonna go to Berkeley and sprinkle salt on the blighter, solve this whole bleedin’ problem.”

Dead silence, then, “Spike?” Giles’ voice, when he ventured it, was shaky and deeply stunned.

Dawn stepped to the right, her face about to crack at the success of her little ploy, and now Buffy could clearly see Giles, gaping, face abruptly drained of what had probably been a blush, because Dawn talking about sex. 

He didn’t stay pale for long, though. Actually, he started in kind of heated as he swung on Buffy, eyes narrowed. “I don’t have to ask, do I, if you found someone to do some sort of resurrection spell? Because you of all people know how dangerous those can be…”

Buffy almost choked on that. “It definitely wasn’t me. Though, to be fair,” and she sent Spike an easy smile that belied the tension, “I have done some blood magick recently which was a little more impressive than anything you probably thought I could ever pull off, so there’s that.”

“Buffy, if you mean to say…”

“It was the amulet, Rupert," Spike interrupted before things could get out of hand. "Buffy had nothing to do with it. Locked me up good and tight like a nice parcel, and dropped me out like a bloody gift-wrapped package for Angel after the fact. Been in LA, till she came to pick me up.”

Buffy’s hand squeezed his, pulling it down to fold them close together. “You weren’t home. That wasn’t home.” / _This_ is./

Sky-blue eyes settled on hers. Warmed. “Was for a bit, yeah?”

“Well,” she conceded, remembering the flipside of the mirror. 

“They spent four months in hell together,” Dawn informed Giles cheerfully, because she was the best at just blurting out the pertinents.

All possible ire was once more arrested in shock. “Good Lord, what?”

“Actually, it was more like five. Almost five, right?”

“Close to, I’d say, yeah.” Spike turned his gaze back to Giles, blunt as ever. “Bit of a long saga, Rupes. You gonna keep us on the stoop to tell it, or invite us in?”

“Oh. Right.” Giles seemed thoroughly rattled. “Ah. Please do come in, Dawn, Buffy…” His eyes narrowed, and he let out a little sigh, but he was genial enough about it. “Spike.”

Once inside, Buffy stuck to business first. Easy enough to do it, with Dawn in there trying not to smack her head on the—for her—low ceiling. And how crazy was it that an almost twelve-foot ceiling could be low for anyone? “Before we start filling you in, Giles, can we make up some, you know, accommodations for Dawn? It’s been tough planning for her, you know. She could always sleep in the bus while we’re here, till we figure out how to get her back to normal size, but she can’t fit into bathrooms or anything, so we’ve been having to do a lot of makeshift… stuff.” 

Giles stilled at that, and then, of course, removed his glasses and began polishing them thoroughly and fiercely. “Well. Yes. Quite. Ah. Yes, this whole thing sounds very unfortunate. Dawn, we must really get you put right as soon as possible. And we shall, but in the meantime, I’ll see to it that we conjure up some sort of… privy facility for you…”

Dawn was blushing a little, but not as much as one might expect, having dealt with the problem for a couple of months now. “Whatever works. This is unfortunately my new normal.”

That quietened Giles’ furious fluttering. “I’m really very sorry that you’ve had to go through all this,” he told her quietly, and slipped the glasses back on to watch her with a firm, regretful regard.

“It is what it is,” she answered a little grimly, and shrugged; an odd maneuver for a person who was sort of half-stooping to avoid banging her head on the light fixtures.

“Yes, I suppose acceptance has been necessary. Ah, excuse me and I’ll speak to a few people. Put them to work on the matter straight off. Make yourselves at home, and I’ll be back shortly.”

Making themselves at home involved Dawn plopping herself down on the slightly worn-looking rug spread out over the stone floor, while Buffy and Spike took a ginger seat on a nearby and much-abused, flower-patterned sofa. “For ‘restorationists’, they’re really not going in for period pieces,” Spike pointed out conversationally.

“It’s just a front,” Buffy answered in a dry tone. “Even if the Organization had the money to actually restore anything, Slayer practice would just beat everything up again.”

“Point.”

Giles was back in a few minutes… and halted in the doorway when he saw the tableau of them; Buffy with her legs draped easily over Spike’s, her hands cradled in his palms, their fingers intertwined, his head leaned on hers with his eyes on their hands. They weren’t speaking in words, but it was one of their habitual postures when sitting together, and Buffy saw no reason to change that to soothe Giles’ injured sensibilities. Spike, ever the rebel, seemed to be feeding off of her willingness to flaunt their relationship so blatantly, and was by turns insouciant, relaxed, belligerent, and victorious beneath her without moving a muscle, the blood tide between them roiling with the mercurial alterations in his mood. 

His eyes, though, never lifted from his study of their hands as Giles came slowly into the room. “I’ve, ah, seen to it. Andrew’s directed a couple of junior Slayers to erect a sort of… outhouse behind the main building here, just beyond the side entrance. It should suffice for a couple of days, and it can be, ah, disposed of inside. There’s a nearby loo…”

Dawn nodded, waving a hand to cut him off. “I’ll figure it out. Thanks.”

“Andrew’s also setting up a bed for you, here inside. There’s a sort of a gallery along the east wall. Used to be a bit of a greenhouse. Should suffice. It’s near the, ah, facility, and has its own exterior exit, large enough to bring planters in and out. And it has a high ceiling, for all it’s going to get fairly bright in the morning. You might have to sleep with something over your eyes…”

“Thank you,” Dawn answered quietly. “I really appreciate it, Giles. And the sun shouldn’t bother me, since we’ve been kind of traveling by night. I’ve just been laying around in the bus lately. I might actually walk around the grounds, just to get some exercise before I crash.”

“Traveling by…” His eyes flickered to Spike. Away again. “Oh, right. Spike will have been driving, I suppose.”

“Yeah. We got a really great education in Punk music. I think I like the Buzzcocks the best. They were really rebels.” She tilted her head at Spike, grinning. “That one I really liked was the Buzzcocks, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, Bit. Them and the Pistols were your favorites.”

Giles took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and his forefinger. It looked like he was trying not to get a headache. Buffy did her best to hide a smile, but she wasn’t sure she was all that successful. “Giles, c’mon. Like you didn’t listen to all that stuff when you were younger. I’m willing to bet money…”

His head rose, and he shot her a deeply disappointed glare. “Yes, I did, Buffy, but to expose Dawn…”

“It was great,” Dawn insisted, clearly trying to get a rise out of him now. “‘Orgasm Addict’ was definitely the best one…”

Spike snorted at the choking noise coming from Giles’ now turkey-wattle-red face. “Leave off, Niblet. You’re gonna give him apoplexy. Besides; you know you actually liked ‘Wild Thing’ best of the whole lot. You’re just trying to mess with the poor bloke.” 

The crimson color slowly drained from Giles’ lined face. “Yes, the Troggs are by far the more suitable choice than… Oh, bloody hell.”

Buffy sputtered out a startled laugh at that. Wow, that was by far the closest she had ever heard her Watcher come to sounding like Spike. Between him and Dawn, they were going to send him right over the edge. “Okay, stop, both of you. Quit trying to turn Giles inside out. Dawn, go for your walk. We’ll let you know when there’s food.”

Grinning irrepressibly, Dawn stooped to her feet. “Where’s the back door?”

“Oh. Ah, that way…” Giles pointed vaguely through a large, arched doorway. “Not sure you can fit through all the doorways, though. You might just have to go round from the front…”

“Alright.”

“I’ll, ah, have someone find you and bring you some breakfast when it’s made.” 

A large hand waved in acknowledgement as she headed for the front door. It opened, closed, and silence fell. Spike broke it with an easy smirk. “Teenagers, yeah?”

“Good Lord, I thought she was trying to make me swallow my tongue.” Moving slowly through the room, Giles stepped with great care into a seat opposite them, and leaned forward to plant his elbows on his knees. Drew in a deep breath. And looked down into his hands. “How, pray tell, did you manage to spend nearly five months living in a hell dimension, when you, Buffy, were only gone a few days?”

Couldn’t have him questioning her sanity. “Collapsing time-loop.”

He started. “I beg your pardon?”

Spike’s hands slid along hers; up and down. She folded her fingers into his, remembering all the long nights, the longer days. The truth they had built between them. “I went to find Spike. Bring him back, if he still wanted me.” A mocking scoff from the man beneath her, which she ignored. “But there was a war about to go down, and I was not about to lose him again, so I joined in. Angel had picked a fight with those Senior Partners of his; the ones who run Wolfram and Hart? That was what all that business was about with pretending to run the law firm…”

“Pretending? I don’t quite follow.”

Buffy met Spike’s pained, sardonic glance, looked away again at their hands. “It was all a ploy, I guess. To get inside, so they could come at the Big Bad from within. We all thought he’d turned bad too, but I guess a lot of it was, Angel was trying to protect his son…”

Giles held up one incredulous hand. “Pardon me. His _son?”_

“His name’s Connor. We were all spelled to forget about him. Angel had him with Darla…”

“That’s not possible, Buffy, and you know it!”

“Tell that to prophecy,” Spike interrupted grimly. “You know that shite will always find a way, and it wanted that little git born.”

Giles looked like he’d had one too many shocks for one night, which didn’t bode well for his day, considering they’d barely gotten started. Spike saw it too. “If you’re already having trouble swallowing this much, Rupes, I’d say you better break out the scotch now, because it’s gonna be a long bloody ride from here on out.”

Her Watcher seemed to shake himself. “Oh. Yes. Quite.” Pushing himself back to his feet, he half-walked, half-stumbled over to a cabinet across the room, opened it up, and pulled out a bottle. Two tumblers. 

“I’ll have one too.”

He froze for a second, clearly stunned, then moved like an automaton to seat a third tumbler inside the other two. He hadn’t been trying to be a rotten host. He was just not used to her drinking. Like, at all. Not that she was planning on having a ton, but she would have a little sip. Just to be companionable. 

When the bottle came back and the label hove close enough to be read, Spike’s eyes widened. “Well, nice to know you don’t skimp, Watcher! Cheers.”

Giles’ answer was dry. “It appears a toast is in order, what with one thing and the other, yes? You lot have defeated the Scourge. You, Spike, have somehow come back from the dead… or the more-than-dead. And apparently Angel has quite inexplicably managed to procure a son for himself.” He finished pouring and lifted his own tumbler, looking thoroughly at sea. “Cheers.”

Spike lifted his own tumbler. Clinked it against Buffy’s with a smirk. “Mazel Tov and all that rot.” And then lifted it into the light from the mellow, golden overheads. “I’m gonna enjoy this.”

Buffy squinted at the label. “Lava-gool…”

“Lagavulin, Buffy; and an ‘83. A proper twenty-five, this. Lovely.”

Buffy sniffed the rich, alcoholic miasma rising from her small finger of whiskey. It smelled really… sweet. Like honey and caramel and… maybe butterscotch? And weirdly, unlike the rougher stuff she’d drunk with Spike before, or by herself later, this didn’t try to burn off the skin inside of her nose or anything. 

Spike was already sipping, and groaning in a way that was, well, suggestive, his body vibrating underneath hers all unfairly, so she might as well join in. She took a sip… and first off, there was the caramel thing. And something… spicy? Stuff she remembered from the other whiskeys she’d had with him; heavy flavors she couldn’t identify; but also maybe almost a dark chocolate note, and a kind of an almost savory, nutty, almost _meaty_ taste at the end when she swallowed it, and okay… She was never going to become an alcoholic, because she really didn’t like cheap alcohol for the sake of getting drunk. If she wanted to go on a bender, it was an extremely goal-oriented thing, seldom thing, and she usually just got it over with and out of her system. But this? 

Maybe when it came to drinking, she was ‘expensive-tastes’ girl, but apparently there was good reason these really high-class drinks were so expensive. It was because they were _good_. /Save you from ever going down the drinking rabbit hole, if you’re gonna do it for the fancy tastes you can’t afford, I guess. Because, _wow_./

When she opened her eyes, Spike’s were on her, riveted and darkly knowing. “Nice, yeah?”

Her belly had a sweet little, cheery fire burning in it. And her body was literally _purring_ against his right now; just from one sip. There were maybe three more of those sips left in the glass, which sounded… dangerous, in present company. 

She cleared her throat with an effort. “If, um, the stuff you gave me that night in your crypt was anything like that, you’d’ve never gotten me out of there. And we’d’ve started this a hell of a lot sooner.”

His grin broadened to something thoroughly suggestive. “What can I say? I’m a rough sort. But I might keep a stock of the nicer things set by, luv, if you take to them so well.” He lifted a finger to brush her hair from her face, eyes sparkling. “Christ, you glow like a Christmas bauble, you know that?”

“Ahem,” Giles broke in, clearing his throat pointedly. “Putting aside your apparent long-term efforts to get my Slayer in her cups…”

Spike scoffed at that. “Girl came to me, Rupert. I just supplied the drink.”

“I supplied the hangover,” Buffy agreed cheerfully, and took another quiet sip. Swallowed slowly. “I wonder if this stuff will even give me one. Wow. Alright, so. Anyway. Moving on…”

“Yes, please. You indicated that Angel did some sort of spell to make us all forget he had a child…”

Buffy cleared her throat a little, because the last swallow of whiskey was haunting the back of her nose pleasantly. “Yeah, I guess there was this whole saga involved that… Well, it’ll be easier if we just tell you about that one later. It’s not really relevant to what happened to us in LA. The Cliffs Notes version is, his son is all grown up now and Angel had his whole team stuck at Wolfram and Hart as part of the deal to protect him. That was why we thought they went bad. But in the end they’d infiltrated enough to do some serious damage to these Senior Partners guys, so the Big Bads wanted payback, and they were about to fight basically every demon the Big Bads could call up from the city to take them down.” She slipped her fingers loose from the tumbler to catch Spike’s once more, threaded their hands together. “I wasn’t about to leave Spike alone to die again, so I stayed and fought with them.” His grip tightened on hers in memory, and in gratitude. “But when it looked like we might actually win, these Senior Partners guys got a little whiny about it and sent the whole city into a hell dimension to punish Angel for going up against them…”

“Wankers,” Spike spat, and tossed back some more whiskey. “Can’t stand to be beat fair and square.”

“And we ended up being stuck there for however long. So we had to make the best of it. Thought maybe we’d be there forever.” She smiled proudly at her love. “Spike and Illyria set themselves up as the demon-lords of Beverly Hills, managed a safehouse there for humans and any demons who weren’t in the business of hurting anyone. I got Angel situated and came back…”

“Situated?” Giles looked completely floored by now at her account.

“Yeah, for some reason the Senior Partners decided to turn him human when they sent us all to Hell-A. He broke his back, his legs… I had to do this Wolfram and Hart blood-magick thing to fix him up, or he’d’ve taken months to heal, with the spells he was using. Wesley’s ghost was trying to help him, and his pet dragon…”

Giles choked, nearly spitting out his mouthful of whiskey. “His pet _dragon?_ And… Wesley’s _dead?”_

“Yeah. Sorry about that, mate.” Spike turned to Buffy with a frown. “Probably not the best way to break it to him that one of his lads bit it, yeah?”

“I didn’t even think about it,” Buffy agreed regretfully. “I’m so used to him now, being, you know, ‘Wesley’s ghost’…”

“How did he…”

“It was before. Before the big fight. Bloke did his part. Took down the demon-mage who’d bound everyone to the bloody firm.” Spike lifted his glass a little in tribute. “Did his bit for king and country, and then some, even afterward.”

Giles subsided back to his chair, looking bereft. Took another deep swig of whiskey… and then lifted incredulous eyes to Buffy once more. “And you did… _blood_ magicks?” He sounded thunderstruck.

“It was a sort of paint-by-numbers spell. There were a lot of those in the Wolfram and Hart building; I think for the lawyers to use. You know, you read it and the letters dissolve as you go? All the magick’s sort of embedded in the ink or something?” Giles nodded like a broken jack-in-the-box. “It probably helped that the Powers were using me as a Conduit there, since I was the only antenna they could tap in a dimension ruled by the Senior Partners. I didn’t get any Slayer dreams while I was there, but apparently my being there totally affected the outcome. I even got to channel one of their messengers near the end…” She lifted her eyes to focus them on her old Watcher. “Cordelia. Which was a trip, getting the 411 from her perspective…”

“Good Lord.”

It was about his fifth ‘good lord’ already tonight. They were going for a record. She wondered how many times he’d say it when she told him why the blood-spell had worked on Angel. But that debate was for a later moment. “Anyway, the magicks thing worked, and I could finally get back to Spike. So we kind of set up housekeeping in Beverly Hills for a few months, till the war started…” His hand folded tight in hers, remembering. “It was a good time. It felt… like a home away from home, in a weird way. But things got tough after a while. We started running out of water, and there were territory-tussles with other demon-lords, and then we pushed too hard against the ones close to us, and it all came down like a house of cards.”

Spike clicked his tongue and settled his glass to balance on his knee. “We lost a lot of our people in that war…”

“People?”

“Demon-girls.” 

Spike’s gaze caught Buffy’s, something deeply speculative in them. /Hmm. Maybe…/ 

“Right nice bunch," he went on, eyes still on hers and filled with surmise. "Our own personal little army. Loyal to the bone…”

“Yeah,” Buffy agreed quietly. It really was an interesting idea actually, if one best tabled for later. “Then it all came down to a fight between us and Gunn…”

“Isn’t he the young man who works with Angel?” Giles was clearly having a tough time following the narrative… and also as thrown by their thoroughgoing intimacy and the oddity of any account which included his Slayer playing house with a bunch of demons. It was a part of the story, she noticed, which he seemed determined to skip right over. 

“Yeah, he got sired when we all went to hell.” Spike’s response was bleak. “He thought he could send us all back home, but he went about it in a piss-poor way. Started a war with Angel ‘cause he blamed the ponce for gettin’ us all there in the first place. Killed him in the end, and his son…”

“Good Lord! Angel’s dead?”

“No so as it took,” Spike answered caustically.

Buffy elbowed him lightly in the ribs. “Stop.”

Giles was now not only wild-eyed but definitely confused. “He’s either dead or he isn’t, if he was turned human…” And he blinked. “Wait, if he was human, there…” His gaze landed on Buffy with uncomfortable surmise. 

“I’m with Spike, now,” she answered firmly. “Angel’s in my past.”

“Ah. I’d… noticed.” He sounded somewhat grim about it. 

She ignored him. “Anyway, Gunn killing Angel scared the Senior Partners into resetting the time-loop. I guess they want him for something in the future. God knows what. So they put us all right back where we started; the night we fought their army in LA. Sent our friend Illyria, the Old One, back into her human shell so she could stop rampaging around destroying everything…”

“Now, just hold on one bloody tick. You’re friends with an _Old One?”_

Spike cleared his throat a little and pulled another sip from his glass. “As much as she can be said to be friends with anyone, yeah. She’s a bit of an odd duck, the Blue Meanie.”

“Good Lord.”

He was starting to sound like a broken record. It was not every day they could crack Giles. It was kind of amusing. “Then we went to Spike’s place, wrapped up his stuff…” /Renewed our mating, but you don’t really need to know about that…/ “…Went to Angel and asked to borrow the Wolfram and Hart jet, and did our best to beat the Scourge up to HQ. You know the rest.” /Well, except for the part where I retired, but we’ll fill you in on that later./ Xander had very specifically agreed to allow her to break that news to their old friend in person.

Giles had sat back in his chair, looking like he’d been hit over the head with something very heavy. Grinning, Spike disengaged his hand from Buffy’s and very kindly poured their host another splash of scotch. “Here. Have another tot, Watcher. Do you good.”

“Yes, quite. Cheers.”

Spike, of course, helped himself to another before he leaned back. Held the bottle over Buffy’s glass in unspoken question. “Oh. Gosh, probably not. Not at least before I have something to eat, or you’ll have to pour me into bed.”

“That can be arranged, luv.” He leered at her but set aside the bottle, picked up his tumbler and sat back amiably. And they waited. 

Giles didn’t even react to the sexual innuendo; just sat there blinking into his undrunk glass like it held the secrets of the universe. After a minute or two Buffy leaned over to stage-whisper into Spike’s ear. “I think we broke him.”

That shook Giles out of his staring match with his whiskey glass, and he blinked up at them. “That is… an incredible tale, I must say. I’d very much like to pick your brains as to the day-to-day details of life in another dimension…”

“Well,” Buffy said, and now it was her turn to lean forward. “That kind of brings us to one of the main reasons we came to talk to you. You know, besides the Dawn thing.”

“Oh?” He sounded suddenly wary. 

She opened her mouth to begin, but before she could, Spike forestalled her with a little shake of their joined fingers. “Buffy, maybe you should have something to eat first, yeah? That’s bound to be another long conversation, and you’ve had a bit to drink. And the Niblet’s out there waiting, as well.”

She was a little startled that he was stalling, but… he always had good reason. And maybe he could smell the alcohol on her blood, too. It wouldn’t surprise her. “You think I’m that bad already?”

“Been worse, but you’ll be the better for a bit of protein, pet.”

Giles’ gaze sharpened. “I don’t want to hazard a guess as to how often you’ve drunk in one another’s company if he can tell how tipsy you might have gotten just from sitting with you, Buffy.”

Buffy rolled her eyes at him. “He can feel me,” she answered thoughtlessly, and pushed to her feet. The room didn’t exactly tilt, but it did waver slightly. /Oh. Okay, fine. Whatever, Mr. So Smart Vampire./

Behind her, Spike remained still, eyeing her with an amused sort of acceptance. “What?”

And then she heard it; the vast, roaring silence from behind her head. From Giles. And she realized, belatedly, what her words had implied. /Oh. Well… it isn’t like I was planning on hiding it./

Squaring her shoulders, she turned back to the man who had, for all intents and purposes, raised her in this world in which she now lived. Faced him down. And waited. /Well?/

She wasn’t sure she had ever seen Giles look quite this pale. Quite this frozen. “Buffy…” he whispered.

“We’ve had to rely on each other,” she told him flatly. “Without reservation. That whole… what’s the word?”

“Dichotomy,” Spike supplied calmly.

“Dichotomy of vampire and Slayer? It didn’t mean anything, there. And it doesn’t mean anything to me, anymore, here. Not with him. We’re just _us_.” 

Giles closed his eyes, a gamut of expressions flooding his face. Terror, disgust, agony...

“Giles,” she tried again, very quietly now. “I made a decision when I saw him go up in flames. And I made another one when I was in hell with him, and I knew at any minute we might lose each other. I definitely never regretted it knowing he could starve to death there. You’re not gonna make me regret it now. I am what I am and he is what he is… and we are what we are. Accept it or not, but it isn’t going anywhere.”

“Losing each other, and starvation, and Buffy… All these things are…”

“You weren’t _there_.” /And, more importantly…/ “You aren’t me. _My_ decision, Giles.”

He breathed again, after a moment. And nodded once, sharply. “I… certainly cannot begrudge… anything any one person must have had to do… to survive… inside a hell dimension… the likes of which I have no foreknowledge…” It was very clear that he was finding it distinctly difficult to get the words out. But he was trying. 

Still, it was enough that Spike could relax a little, there on the couch. His chill posture for sure hadn’t fooled Buffy for a second. But he definitely hadn’t lost all of his tension. Which made sense, since if this was Giles’ reception to the whole biting thing, then he was really going to question the rest, once he heard the remainder of the story.

But _that_ could definitely wait for breakfast.

***  
  
  
  
  
  
and how Giles will handle "the rest" is... debatable, to say the least.  
A lot of stuff to uncover, a long time coming. KaBlam, as they say.  
  
As a side-note, I'm kinda sad I really don't get to use my (previous, used for my Smallville saga) research into the sights and tours of St. Petersburg, to really let these kids have fun in this setting, since things just really don't turn out that way in this fic. We might have to come back sometime. Ah well. 


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... here's where Things Get Real with Giles, part 1. There's good and bad woven through it. 
> 
> Things get real with Giles again in oddly sweeter ways, sort of, in the following chapter, and then go pear-shaped again... then sort of get better in the chapter after that, I think... 
> 
> It's a rocky road. But, you know, it's Buffy and Giles, which... sadly, I have to roll with where canon left them for a while before I can get these two straightened out. A lot of baggage there. :-(

“So,” Giles said, spearing his sausage with something like terse violence. “You were about to enlighten me as to something particularly interesting regarding life in another dimension. And based upon that, to ask me, I believe, a question?”

Buffy poked at her egg and pondered how to get into the whole subject of part-demon relationships with dimensional shifts and all that. She supposed she would first have to introduce the whole theory of her being part-demon in the first place and see if, you know, her Watcher had been lying to her by omission for the entirety of her Slayer-y life. Which really didn’t sound of the fun. But the time was now and all that good stuff. 

Beside her, straddling the bench so that he could face her and not Giles, Spike radiated love and support. And, well, his cool hand was on her thigh, his fingers settled just shy of his most recent bite, which could not but communicate connection, and certitude. It sent a feeling of absolute, anchored conviction through her that settled every flutter of doubt, plumbed her depths and left her calm and sure and _right_. “I don't know if this is something that’s in the ‘Vampyre’ book, since obviously I never completely read it…” /Or, you know, read much of it at all./ “…Or if it's something that might be in some secret Watcher book…” /You know, one that you never showed me because it was considered way too dangerous to show the little Slayers./ “…Or if it's something that you would just learn by word of mouth… Or something you even realized recently, since you didn't know about the shadow-play thing until we set that up…”

Spike’s fingers squeezed on her leg, and he was right. She was dithering. Putting it off. “But I need to know.” /What I really am. For sure. More than that, because… I _know_. I _feel_ it. I want to know; did you know. Did you just… not tell me? Or were you as surprised as I was?/ God, she found herself praying that Giles just… hadn’t. She didn’t know if she could face it if he let her down again. But at the same time, knowing the Council like she did, it was honestly hard to imagine that they _wouldn’t_ know. That they _wouldn’t_ have created such an elaborate fiction around her life, and the lives of her sisters since time immemorial, and just basically kept every Slayer since the beginning of time suspended in this ignorant web of lies so they could use all these innocent young girls as tools. /So they could wield us they way they wanted. And whenever the rare one of us lived long enough to grow up enough and realize that we were being used that way? Enough to recognize all of it, or even a part of it…/ 

It started to make her wonder about things like the Cruciamentum, and the way the Council had treated her after she started to get a mind of her own. Because the minute she and Faith decided they didn’t want to play by Council rules, wanted to dictate their own, realized that they didn’t have to do what those bad old white guys said… /They completely lost their shit, didn’t they? And that’s what happens when you pull the blindfold off and start seeing things the way they really are./

Something about her lost expression must have alarmed Giles, because he quietly set down his fork. “Buffy, if there’s anything I can help you with, I will try. I know… I’ve a lot to make up for, with you…” And his eyes briefly flickered to Spike before settling back on her.

Spike tensed slightly, but otherwise didn’t react. She fought not to as well. /At least he’s acknowledging it./ And that recognition of debt was enough, for the moment, to push her forward. “Okay here's the thing.” She opened her eyes fully on her Watcher. Pinned him flat with her glare. “Giles, am I a sheep or a sheepdog?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Spike turned to stretch his legs out under the table, folded his hands on the top. Pushed back, stretching out. “Buckle up Rupert; it’s going to be a long bloody trip.”

“Don't be a dick.” She shot him a quelling but tolerant glance. He lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender, and she turned back, frowning at the table. “The spell I used to fix Angel; it needed blood from someone ‘born of human, part of demon…” She shot the old man a pointed look. “Slayer blood seemed to do the trick. Which is confirmation enough, even if Cordy didn’t back it up as a whole Powers That Be thing; you know, a ‘we wouldn’t even be able to withstand PTB-Conduit Slayer dreams, much less have the strength to fight demons, if we weren’t all demon-y ourselves’. So obviously the shadow-play wasn’t lying.” She kept her eyes on him, waited. “But I’m assuming you already knew that before we opened it up.”

In the end it was Giles who glanced away. Only very briefly, but it was tell enough. And, yes, she had been expecting it. Didn’t mean it didn’t hurt; probably more than she had thought it would, even now. /Damn. Damn you, Giles. You could have told me. Do you know how different things would have been if you’d just _told_ me, back before Spike and I… Before I hated myself so much that I took it out on him, and… And, _God_ ; what does this mean for me and the whole big soul-question? Like, how many do I have rattling around in here?/ Had that been the reason for the other huge lie? All that ‘soulless’ this and ‘soulless’ that? /Well, besides making sure I would hate you enough to treat you like shit and try to kill you like an animal without seeing you as a person, of course./

Spike’s hand dropped to tighten on her thigh. Forgiveness and affirmation. An acknowledgment that, in a way, they had both been the victims of an enforced ignorance.

The source of all of it started in one place. Which meant if Giles knew this part… “The Scourge said that whatever the first Watchers used to infect Sineya…” She lifted her eyes to meet his. Skewered him firmly. “They said it was a vampire’s demon. That that’s why we only feel vampires, and not other demons. That that’s why we’re drawn to them…”

Giles jerked, and his eyes slipped away from Buffy to touch on Spike with interest and a slow fascination. Which helped, to know that maybe… he hadn’t known; the second part, at least. It made it possible for her to breathe again. “They also said that every time I’ve died, a little bit of the human side of me has lost strength, while the demon part of me has gotten stronger. And I remember, Giles; after the Master killed me, I did. I felt _stronger_. And after my second death, I changed. I wanted the dark, as much as the light. Wanted to be with Spike, in the night, in his world; so bad it was like needing to breathe. I felt so _ashamed_ of it… but I _needed_ it, to the point where I almost went too far; like Faith. It scared me, how close I came to forgetting the part of me that was about the day and the light. I almost… went out of balance, because I had to realize… it was a part of me.” Spike’s fingers, lightly caressing the top of her thigh; letting her know he would always treasure the parts of her that were sunshine and daytime. “It still is,” she finished quietly. “I’ve been finding that balance again ever since.” 

Giles’ eyes were calculating now, on the two of them, but Buffy barely noticed. A cool hand had stolen across the table to catch and thread with hers during this recital. She bore down tight, to find the fire there, as she continued to meander through her reasoning. “And after Warren,” she went on quietly, “it was like something hit a reset button in me. I’m even more comfortable sitting between worlds… but I almost don’t really feel like a part of either. When I was in hell, with Spike… it was like the demon side of me went to sleep, it was so comfortable. I was almost… too human. Not weak, since my Slayer-side was still there when I needed it, but the rest of the time I was…” She shook her head. “It was almost like being a Potential again unless something was going down. It was perverse. I’ve never felt like that since I was Called.” She flickered a pointed gaze at the ex-Council rep. “But not broken. Not like being drugged.” Saw him flinch. “More like it came in waves. And the bond between me and Spike has made it possible for me to almost… find the edges of it; between my human parts and my Slayerness…” /Soul?/ “…For the first time in my life. Like instead of being all infused or whatever, I can… feel where I mesh. Control it, almost. And I can tell how different it feels here, at home, than it did there. Here it feels stronger. On guard. At the ready.”

Her little diatribe had Giles leaning forward in interest. “Now, that is something truly worth investigating, Buffy. Obviously the Council has never had the opportunity to investigate what effect a vampiric blood-bond might have with the Slayer… intermixture. And this business with your Slayer-self interacting differently with the environment in that other dimension… How intensely fascinating.” He looked rapt. “Was this an effect only you felt, or did you also feel the same thing, Spike?” And then a wash of disappointment crossed his face. “Or, I suppose, being an entirely different sort of being…”

“Oh, I felt it, Watcher.” Spike sounded dryly amused to be asked. “You’d think we’d be opposite, since we’re sort of opposites, yeah? But it was somewhat the same, actually. Had to rouse the bloody demon with a good fight or a good feed or a good…” He tilted his head slightly, and in spite of herself, Buffy blushed. Giles promptly removed his glasses and began polishing them. “Elemental creatures, demons. Mostly felt like having a kip the whole sodding time, like it was siesta on the porch hammock, and we were in Cancun. Felt right at home there, I reckon. Woke straight up the second we came back, though, and we felt the bond revert to Angel…”

The glasses popped back on. “I beg your pardon?”

Buffy eyed Giles patiently. “You never wondered why I was so hung up on him for so long?” She tapped her old bite scars pointedly, though they were more or less covered by the collar of her shirt.

“Oh.” He leaned back against the wall, looking flabbergasted. “I honestly never considered it.” His face tightened then, expression turning belatedly thunderous. “Well that’s just… What a great, unbelievable prat! He did it without telling you?”

Buffy felt her lips twist in answer. “I didn’t even _know_ about claims back then to know what was going on.” /Which, just for the record, might kind of count as a hole in my education. Who’s fault that was…/

/Well, to be fair, probably both of ours, considering I was a crappy student, but you knew I was in a relationship with a vampire, too, which kind of made you a crappy teacher, huh?/ Rough thoughts to have at this point in proceedings. They almost felt traitorous. But they were also painfully real.

“Fixed that right off,” Spike murmured smugly. “Git.”

Buffy inhaled, pushing the whole thing off. “It’s past history, William.”

Spike grumbled something under his breath that she was probably glad she couldn’t make out. 

“Anyway,” Buffy went on, leaning forward. She snugged her elbows on the table and caught her Watcher’s gaze. “Now we’re back, it’s all different again. I almost don’t know how to be a Slayer anymore. Not with everything I’ve seen and done, because it’s too easy to see the shades of gray. I don’t know how to stand on the human side of the line anymore. I straddle it, Giles; every day.” She shrugged, avoiding what she knew was his pained expression. “I guess what I really need to know is, did you know? I mean, obviously you knew that we were part-demon in some way. You weren’t shocked at all about the shadow-play…” /Dammit./ “And by the way, if you’d told me about that, Spike and I might’ve had it a lot easier. You have no idea how much I’ve hated myself for things I couldn’t control; things that were just a part of me…”

Giles’ face went gray. “Buffy, I assure you, everything I did, anything I withheld, I did so out of a wish to protect you. To make things easier on you. You’d been through such a terribly difficult _rite de passage_ with Angelus, and I thought…”

She held up a hand to stop him, rage warring with an oblique comprehension. /You thought I’d hate myself even more. God, don’t you see, Giles? It might’ve made me _understand_ myself! Forgive myself, even, for not being able to stop! For needing to go back, with Spike! For… all of it!/

But it was over. It was the past. And what she really needed to know, was… did he know the rest. “Did they tell you, when they trained you? About which demon? Because when Merrick found me, he didn’t say, ‘Hey, Buffy, you’re a demon-slayer’. He made sure to say ‘vampire’. Top of the list. He singled them out. And I can think of two reasons why we’re pointed at them so completely; why they’re our main enemy. One, it’s because they’re the ones we were originally made to combat, which just totally supports the whole ‘use what’s attacking you against itself’ thesis. Or, it’s some kind of smokescreen to keep us from wanting to get too close to…” She remembered Dracula’s words. Shivered inadvertently. “Kindred.”

Spike made a choking sound. She twitched her fingers on his, eyes hard and inescapable on the careworn face before her. “No more lies, Giles; no more omissions. I need to know. Is this… why? Why we’re supposed to die young? Before we can find out that we were made out of the creatures they sent us to kill, because it makes it easier for us to be a weapon, if we’re too ignorant to realize we’re basically being pitted against our relatives? Because otherwise it seems kind of wasteful of the Council to just go through so many young girls for so many thousands of years like we were… disposable, just because they knew there would always be another one. Like, ‘You know, whatever; we have more, there are always more’.”

Giles gaped at her for a moment, but then his mouth snapped shut and the pained expression returned, along with something slightly anguished. It twisted his countenance, and it reminded her of that day he had first confessed to her about the Cruciamentum, and… /I really, really hope you didn’t know./ She had the sick, sick feeling that he did, though. “But I can so see them doing that, if we started to ask too many questions, or got too uppity and they thought they couldn’t control us…” She tightened her fingers on Spike’s hand till her own knuckles went white. “Or, God forbid, started to get too close to vampires who are old enough to think past their blood, like Angel, and Spike…”

Giles winced. And removed his glasses again.

It was _way_ too much of a tell. Because she remembered, now. Angel had come back. And they hadn’t trusted her anymore. Not even Giles, really. Not that she could blame him, after Angelus. But… The Cruciamentum had been after… that. “And if I’m a wolf-dog hybrid who was forced to be a sheepdog to guard the flock from the wolves, I think it’s pretty asshole-ish for them to punish me and act all shocked that I have a tendency to, you know, feel the call of the wild and want to run off and join the wolves once in a while.” Yes, now she knew why Spike had wanted her to reread that book. “And I get that that scared them; and that it might scare the hell out of you, Giles, since I’m so powerful, and I could be such a big bad weapon for the bad guys, instead—like Faith was, for a while—but seriously? It’s not like I can really be with a human guy, either; or at least, not in any functional way, so I guess that was a part of the ‘die young and lonely’ thing, too, right?”

Her painful rant died in a profound silence; one broken, after a very long moment, by Spike’s low rumble. “I think what the Slayer’s tryin’ to say, Rupes, is she’s looked away from the dancing shadows, and realized she’s been in a cave all her bloody life.”

“Yes, thank you, Spike. I, too, have a thorough grounding in Plato.” The ironic tones in Giles’ voice were not as bathed in sarcasm as they might have been in the past. He mostly just sounded beat-down and lost. And then he sighed like air being let out of a balloon, and the glasses went back on. “For starters, yes. I suppose it would make a beautiful sort of sense for those very desperate men to have used the vampire’s demon to begin the Slayer line; but Buffy… I quite honestly do not know the answer you seek on that front. Though I can agree that conjecture certainly leads us that way, insofar as that species would have been early man’s greatest predator…”

“Exactly.” It was a relief, in a way, to find that Giles hadn’t lied to her at least with regard to that part of the puzzle.

“And yes. A great many Slayers have, for lack of a better verbiage, ‘gone dark’, and have had to be dealt with over the years, or else there would never have had to be a wetworks team. It never occurred to me to question whether… it was something integral to the very nature of the Slayer which caused that careful balance to be set awry… or that it might even have been because you might all be trapped in some way. That I might be serving as a sort of a captor.” His face looked abruptly old, oddly gray. “But I can confirm…” He hesitated. Looked away. “…That it alarmed the Council right off when you started dating Angel. I think they wrote you off entirely as of then. It certainly only grew worse from there on out, and that I had to run a great deal of interference for you thereafter, and even to lie right out, and quite often, to keep them out of your life until they arrived during the business with Glory and you convinced them to take your part.”

/I _knew_ it./ Actually, they had probably written her off long before that, considering they had left her to rot in an asylum for a couple weeks. She kind of doubted, in hindsight, that that was standard operating procedure for most Slayers… but then, most Slayers didn’t still have their parents and law enforcement to deal with, and a bunch of bad press for having burnt down their school. /And then they let me end up with their biggest black sheep Watcher, and only sent Wes after I died… and refused to stay conveniently dead./

Damn the Council. “Why didn’t _you_ write me off, Giles?” She needed to know. Was it because he, too, had once been a mess, and he got it? Or… “You always seemed willing to be openminded about the situation, until…” /Well, until Angelus completely changed your mind about vampires./

Giles frowned. “He seemed to make you happy,” he answered simply. “And I knew… you had very little of happiness in your life. I knew…” He winced. “…That what life you might have was likely to be short. I wanted you to find some joy; some facsimile of normalcy. If it was a vampire who gave you that, I thought perhaps it was meet, considering the world in which you lived.” His face tightened. “Then.”

/Until it seemed like I would live. Until you wanted me to. Until you wanted me to have a normal life./ “It kind of is, when you think about it,” Buffy told him softly. “This _is_ my normal. I tried what other people call normal— _human_ normal—and it just messed me up, trying to fit into it.” She shrugged off his flinch. “I know… Angelus really messed you up, Giles. God knows he really messed me up too, but to be fair… he messed Spike up. And Drusilla. And everyone else he touched. And he really shouldn’t be our poster-boy for how all vampires work.”

Spike made a seriously derisive noise. “Ever bothered to ask anyone else how we work, Rupert? Anyone besides the sociopath with the bleedin’ curse?” 

That aside earned Spike a faint glare. “No, actually I hadn’t thought to, since every other vampire I’d met till much later was either mad, or an equally unrepentant killer; and then after that simply an insufferable irritant with the diction of a grade three petty criminal.”

Spike grinned broadly and curled his tongue. “Made it a bit past grade three and you know it. And my crimes aren’t petty. Just impatient.” 

Buffy rolled her head on her neck, wondering if it was remotely possible for Spike to get along with anyone male in her entire circle of known associates. “Could we please stay on task? Just for a minute, here?” She turned a pointed gaze on Giles. “For the record, you _both_ sound like third-graders.”

Giles looked deeply affronted at her accusation. “I hardly think you need to be so insulting, Buffy. You know for a fact…”

She pinned him with a finger; pointed straight at his face. “We were talking about the Council. You said they had it in for me. Did they order you to take me out? Is that what they were hoping for, with the Cruciamentum?”

He blanched, stared down at his half-emptied breakfast plate. “Buffy, it’s true that most Slayers don’t survive the Cruciamentum, but it is a time-honored…”

“Way to get rid of any Slayer before she can start thinking for herself, start wanting to live her own life; or, you know, really start rebelling and wanting to have any actual _relationships_ outside of the Council-approved ones.” Giles flinched again, but she’d given this a lot of thought. To how lucky she’d actually been to have the life she’d had, and the Watcher she’d had. If she’d been someone like Kendra… “Or she might get pregnant, like Nikki Wood. Or fall for some demon instead of fighting them. Or even just ask too many questions. So, yeah. Throw her in there. Tell her it’s an achievement, a tradition, while she still believes in following orders.” Giles had turned progressively paler as she grated on. “And if she survives, she’s welded even more to her purpose, because she’s convinced that all vampires are vicious animals who should be put down on sight.” Yes, she had spent a lot of time dwelling on this on the drive over. /Lucky for you, Faith. You missed out on that one./

Giles was clearly staggered by her incisive accusation. “Buffy, I… Bloody hell.”

“What in the name of bollocks is this Cruciamentum rubbish you keep talking about, luv?” Spike sounded thoroughly put out that he had been left in the dark.

Buffy turned to face him, aware this was not going to go over well at all. “When a Slayer turns eighteen, her Watcher’s instructed to drug her; to keep her weak as any human girl. Dull her mind, so she can’t even access her instincts and reflexes the way a Potential would. Then she’s dumped in some controlled, locked house with an insane vamp, and she supposedly has to prove her skill, without her abilities. If she survives, they consider her ‘worthy’ to keep the title.” The bleak, uninflected tones were all she could manage, as the memories swamped her. The helplessness, the terror. And, at the end, the certainty of her death. /And, Mom. God; _Mom_./ “As if we should have had to prove our worth, when we were _born_ with it, when we we’re the only ones.” She’d gained a lot, that day, yes… but it wasn’t what the Council had wanted her to learn. She firmly believed that now. “It was just more Council scare-tactics, to keep the Slayers in line; or to kill us off if we managed to survive long enough to threaten their control; wasn’t it, Giles?”

Spike was on his feet, the growl rumbling through his chest like murder. “I knew a lot of the chits died at that age, but that their own…” He swung on her Watcher, murder filling his visage. “You didn’t participate in this filthy trial, did you, Giles? Say you didn’t; say it right now, or I’ll have your throat.” 

“I…” He hesitated. “They were going to remove me unless I went along. In the end I confessed it all to Buffy. It happened anyway, though not for lack of trying to get them to call it off…”

Giles jumped when Spike’s fist went through the table right in front of his face. 

Buffy didn’t. She’d felt it coming, and laid a hand on his trembling arm. “He did try,” she informed him softly. “It was too late. But he did try. That was when they fired him, and sent Wesley.”

He was this close to vamping. This close to losing control, the breath coming in and out of him in short, sharp huffs. “Spike. I made it through. We both did. I got him, got Mom out…”

It was already bad enough. She shouldn’t have mentioned her mother. “Spike…”

_“Joyce_ was…” Even without the deadly, amber flickers to his gaze, the snarl rebounding through the small room was enough to make Giles shrink back against the wall like he hoped he could become part of it. 

“Spike. I got her out. She was fine…”

He wasn’t going to hold it together. She came to her feet, tugged his bloody hand out of the remains of the table. Tugged him around to face her and caught his eyes. They were fully amber, now, feral, his bones flickering with the struggle as his demonic visage writhed just underneath. “I made it through,” she whispered again, earnestly. “We both did.”

He caught her around the waist, buried his face in her neck. Against his bite, and struggled with all he had to stay out of game face, while the thought of it coursed through him. The smell of her, whole and safe, warring with the images all-too-easily seen. “Who was the sodding bastard?” he demanded, his voice a snarl just this side of violence. 

“His name was Kralik…”

That was it. He vamped. She felt him go; the surge of violent rage flooding her in a backwash through the bond as his brow ridges sprang into being against her neck, her shoulder, and his nails thickened like claws to dig hard into her sides. And yet his voice lost its growl to become almost anguished. “Christ, Buffy; you spent your eighteenth birthday fending off that fucking pervert with nothing but your wits?”

If she didn’t keep hold of him he was going to turn around and tear Giles limb from limb, if only because there was no one left from the Council to rend to shreds. “You knew him?”

“Knew of him. Oh, Love, oh bloody, bloody _fucking_ Christ… Did he…”

“He tried. I didn’t let him.”

Spike was out of words. He was in his demonside, had ceased any capacity for communication. All he could do was flex his fingers, digging them deep into her ribs while he breathed raggedly into her neck, feral and terrified for her… because there was no one left for him to fight. His mate had been in trouble, and there was no sense of time right now in his mind; no recognition that when this had occurred, he had actually belonged to an entirely other woman and had been off somewhere in South America or wherever with Drusilla. What mattered to him right now was that he hadn’t been there, with her, where she’d needed him, to fight and kill by her side. 

She slid a hand up into his hair. “It’s long over. Maybe after this we can go find something to slay.” She frowned in recognition of the hour. “Or I guess spar, or something.”

He found his voice again at that. “Bombed ones got off easy. I’m going to hunt down every last remaining one of those bastards and skin them alive.”

Was it bad that a teeny tiny part of her almost wouldn’t feel too bad if he did? “I don’t think The First missed any of them.”

“They missed one. Sodding Wes got off easy, too.” He whirled back on Giles, game face livid, eyes like hot coals; and the only reason he wasn’t on her Watcher right now was because she had a strong grip on his body, was holding him back. “I thought you’d never betrayed her before you left. You unimaginable fucking _sod.”_

Giles looked very small from where he sat, staring down at the hole in the table. “I don’t believe they ever thought Buffy was Slayer material from the start. They sent their worst to manage a hellmouth, without even telling me that was what it was. I always knew a very great deal about demonology, but as to the deeper politics of the Council…” His eyes rose very slowly from the table, to some spot in between them and the wall; and for the first time in years, Buffy really saw him. 

He looked old. “I have always been rather an outcast. Certainly I never aspired to the higher echelons, was never let into the inner workings of things. I’ve no insight into that sort of intrigue. Very much a flunky, I’m afraid; not even middle management, and definitely an outsider. I had very few friends, and certainly not in high places.” He looked very tired as he rubbed his hand over his face. “I was admittedly underprepared for the job; but as it happens, I think it turned out to make us a better team than they expected, in the end, since I too was a bit of a rebel. But…” His shoulders shook a little. “I felt I had to play a certain amount of politics on Buffy’s part if I was to help her survive their machinations. If I was to remain in my position to run interference, and save her what ended up happening anyway, when they inflicted her with a perfect Council drone like Westley.” 

He pushed his plate firmly away and leaned back. “So, yes. I made some wrong bloody calls. But I did them with the best of intentions. And I prayed every moment that my Slayer would make it out of things alive, despite their every prediction.” His eyes, as he lifted them to meet Buffy’s, glowed. “And you far surpassed every hope or dream I could ever have conceived in my wildest imaginings. You outlasted every single one of them, didn’t you Buffy.”

After a moment, she nodded understanding. He’d had his own crucible. His own rocks and hard places. So maybe they could understand each other, after all. “They were probably right, that I wasn’t Slayer material. At least, not the kind they wanted…”

Spike growled fitfully, still a tense handful in her grasp. With a sigh, Buffy tugged him back down with her toward the seat. He came extremely reluctantly, but he did come. “And in the end it’s probably good I went through that...” The growl pitched up to a dangerous snarl of denial. She ran a soothing hand down his arm, till he dropped back to the low growl. “…Went through all of it. Because I can see it all through clear eyes, now. And it made me who I am. Helped me to understand _what_ I am.” She squeezed the arm under her hand. “What they never wanted me to know I was.”

The growl slowly subsided, and one pale hand slid out on the table to fumble with the scotch tumbler there. Buffy wasn’t sure it was necessarily the best idea for her guy to have another drink, but at least he didn’t seem actively prepared to wreak violence anymore, so that was of the good. Reaching out, she tugged the handle of whiskey away from the center of the broken table to within his reach. He grunted in thanks and sloshed a vicious, full measure into the thing and then slugged it down hard. 

Buffy winced. She kind of thought she caught Giles doing the same. 

“I don’t know,” Giles spoke up warily, “whether your nature simply pulled you in this direction, or whether it was more a matter of environment, having essentially grown up on a hellmouth…”

Spike muttered something about ‘trauma’ and ‘abuse’ and ‘filthy bastards’, and poured himself another very full drink. 

/Are you for or against? Jeez?/

Giles wisely did not comment. “I’m honestly not entirely sure I’m qualified to have an opinion at this point in the proceedings. As I’ve said, Buffy, what you've done surpasses any expectations I or the Watchers Council could ever have imagined putting on any Slayer. I certainly couldn't say anything about it what you choose to do with your own time. I don't think any of us should question a single thing about how you make your judgments as long as you do the work…” He paused thoughtfully. “Or, really, since I’ve said the same to Faith, so long as you don’t do the opposite, and use your powers for ill. And though she’s been through as much in her own way, she’s also accomplished far less, been held to a much lower standard. So really, on balance, that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?”

“Too right,” Spike muttered grimly into his scotch. “Done your bloody part, and then some.”

He’d given her the opening. It was time. “I’m not doing the work anymore,” she informed her Watcher quietly. “I _am_ taking a page out of Faith’s book. I’m retiring. I’ve handed the HQ over to Xander and Satsu. Spike and I are taking Dawn and going somewhere quiet, after this. They can call me if they need me, but I don’t think they will anymore for the day-to-day…”

Giles’ eyes widened in shock. “You’ve already stepped aside?”

He needed to understand. “You said as long as I’m not hurting anyone, right? Well… I was hurting them just by being there; with Spike. And I’m not going to live without him anymore. I’ve earned my peace.” She dropped her hand to Spike’s thigh, seeking that bolstering sense of verve he always gave her. Felt his free hand slip down to cover hers; always there. “And, Spike and I have gone through some things that…” She firmed up her gaze on Giles’. “I might not be very effective anymore as a Slayer, at all. I don’t know what kind of a leader I’ve been in this new world, but I definitely know I can’t lead anymore with him and me as we are now. They have to draw lines I’ve had to stand on…” She met her mate’s eye, watched with both relief and a faint regret as his game face faded back to his human countenance. Felt Giles’ infinitesimal relaxation at the shift. She barely noticed the difference, anymore, to the point where it surprised her that it would bother anyone to see him vamp. It was just his monster; and such a beautiful monster. But they still saw a terrifying demon, didn’t they? “But I don’t think I even stand on that line anymore. I might just cross over it fifteen times a day, depending on my needs. And they can’t work with that kind of ambiguity and survive.”

When Giles spoke up again, it almost startled her, she was so caught in the conversation between her eyes, and Spike’s. 

“Because you let him feed on you?” It was an astute question, but it missed about half, maybe more, of the reasons.

Spike leaned back to shoot her a brief, questioning look. /Yeah./ She knew the moment of truth had arrived. They both knew it.

Buffy shook her head in negation. “That’s not what we do.” She turned her gaze on Giles, faced him dead on… and let the walls fall down on his personal mental Jericho. “Because I helped him feed on others.”

The silence this time was so profound it almost made her ears bleed. And what she saw in her ex-Watcher’s eyes was, really, about what she had expected. 

Giles was gaping at her in utter and complete, shocked horror. /Did Jezebel live in Jericho, or was that another story?/ Buffy didn’t know from Biblical stories; or, really, any of these Classical references Spike and him traded like baseball cards. “Donors to supplement what I gave him,” she elaborated quietly. “He wasn’t going to make it on just me. And he didn’t want to weaken me when I might have to fight for my life…”

“Well, that’s all very considerate of…” Giles’ voice sounded like a rusty hinge. “You… Helped…”

“Giles. It was a working economy in a place where everyone knew the stakes.”

Her quiet, unashamed justification floored him. He stared at her like he had never seen her before. Like he didn’t know her at all. /Guess all that _‘I don't think any of us should question your judgments as long as you do the work’_ garbage was just a big fat lie, huh? Or does this count as _‘using my powers for ill’?/_ Of course, to be fair, she would once have classified it as such, willing donations or no. But that was then and this was now. /And you’re gonna have to be patient with him. Walk him through it till he can see it for what it was./ “I thought you wouldn’t begrudge anything we needed to do to survive in hell.”

“Well, yes, but that was before… Weren’t there animals to eat, or…”

Something flooded through Buffy; something like outrage held too long under wraps… and not all of it was pointed outward. “Listen.” Grabbing Spike’s arm, she dragged it forward and shoved his sleeve abruptly up to expose his bicep.

“Oi!”

“You see this?” she demanded of her Watcher, and then grabbed the tails of her lover’s shirt and shoved them up to expose his scarred abs. 

“Leave off, Buffy, I’m not on the bleedin’ auction block!”

She ignored him to lay a palm flat on his taut stomach. “He only has these because he’s been on the diet he was _made_ to consume.” She jerked the shirt back down. “Do you have any idea what we did to him, starving him on pig swill for four years and then demanding that he be at peak performance at the drop of a hat? You should see Angel right now, after years of that crap. He looks like hammered shit.” Giles opened his mouth, but she didn’t give him a chance to speak. “Do you know that I might not have _died_ if Spike had been living on human blood? Because he would have recovered already from what Glory did to him, and he might have been fast enough, strong enough to beat that crazy demon sorcerer who cut up Dawn on that tower, but instead he was _half_ the vampire we expected him to be!”

“Buffy…”

She whirled on Spike. “Tell me it’s not true.”

He couldn’t. Not really. “I could’ve been cleverer.”

She ignored that lameness to swing back to the flummoxed Watcher. “I fought him before, and I fought him after…”

“How in God’s name did you do that, pray tell, Buffy, if his chip…”

“Because his chip didn’t work on me after I died,” she informed her Watcher darkly, and ignored, too, his flabbergasted expression at that bit of late-coming news. “Despite which he never once hurt me, by the way…”

“Now, you and I know that’s not entirely true, Buffy…”

“That’s completely different, _both_ times, and you know it, Spike; and that’s not what I was talking about anyway, so let me get to the point!”

He shut it and let her have the floor. 

“The _point_ is, he was nearly my equal before the chip, and I could wipe the floor with him after, strength-wise. He had to pull out all the stops, use every ounce of skill gleaned from a hundred-plus years of fighting for his very existence just to keep up, after. That was all that kept him alive, because he was a shell of himself.”

“Made me a better fighter, in the end…”

“Shut _up_ , Spike! Giles, in hell he _couldn’t_ be a half a vamp. Not half-strength; not and survive, not to mention protect _hundreds_ of lives. And he sure the hell couldn’t let other demons see him down in the basement eating rats! The politics there were ridiculous. He _had_ to be strong, in _every_ way!”

Giles’ hand flew up. “Alright. Granted.” Hazel eyes flickered to Spike’s, lingered there, harsh and unwilling. “But here, and putting aside that you were feeding off of a bunch of traumatized, abused…”

“Grateful volunteers who were free to say no at _any_ time,” Buffy insisted, glaring. /Look at _me_ , not him. This is between you and _me_. And _you_ weren’t there./

“Alright. Fine then. Still. Here it’s an entirely other proposition. There are hospitals here, should he choose not to visit the butcher’s, or should you wish to keep him at, er, peak performance…” He hemmed and hawed a little, and off came the glasses again for a furious polish, because only an idiot would miss the inadvertent sexual innuendo in that one.

Buffy shot Spike a burning, shushing glance, because she _knew_ him. Saw the mischief dancing in his eyes, the way he was fighting back a grin, and alright, she was glad he was in a better mood, but he still needed to keep his comments to himself. She so did not need him saying anything to her Watcher about how much she liked to keep him at ‘peak performance’. 

The terrible urge to speak up vanished under a bright, innocent look. “What? I didn’t say anything!”

“You were going to.”

“I wasn’t!”

/Yeah, you just manfully swallowed every word of it before I even looked at you. Idiot./ He had the impulse control of a toddler. 

Whatever horror Giles was currently feeling seemed to have vanished under dry humor. “I daresay you two are possibly worse than Xander and Anya.”

That jerked Buffy’s head around to stare at him in amazement. “No one asked you to exaggerate, Giles.”

“Well, you certainly don’t mention things by name nearly as often, but it’s no sinecure when we all know exactly what you’re thinking at every possible moment.”

“Well, maybe Anya was just more honest than the rest of us.” The vengeance demon had once made her uncomfortable, but then Buffy had had her own repression to deal with back then. Now she could think back fondly on the blunt blonde. Even if Anya had screwed her guy. 

“That chit was more honest than a lot of people,” Spike agreed, and lifted his glass in a toast to the dead.

She supposed he was right. And anyway, no use holding on to old grudges against people who were long gone, anyway. Especially since she knew Anya really hadn’t been Spike’s type. No more than she was, really. The only blondes he’d ever gone after had been the one night stand with Anya after their break-up, which she knew for a fact had been about her, all those blondes the First had had him go after— _‘God, help me, Buffy… it's still all about you.’_ —and… well, Harmony. Which, okay. She was the oddball, and what _was_ that thing with Harmony, anyway? Just a ditzy cheerleader from Buffy’s high school class who’d…

/Oh. Oh, God./

“What?” Spike asked, pulling back a bit. Which was when she realized she was staring at him in horror. 

She shook her head to shake off the notion. /No, it _can’t_ be./ “Nothing.” /Or, at least, I really _hope_ not./ She turned firmly back to Giles. /Just shake it off./ “Yes, there are hospitals, and mortuaries. And willing donors in this world, too. And we’ll work it out, on our own terms. But that wasn’t even completely what I was talking about, with the shades of gray…”

“Oh God; what else is there?” Giles looked ready to be hit with a baseball bat at this point. “Have you adopted a demon child or something?”

Spike snorted grimly at that, clearly hearkening back to their conversation on the bus, and tossed back the last finger of scotch in his glass. “No, I think we have our hands full with the Bit.”

Buffy thought very seriously of pinching him. “I’ve reconsidered my role in the whole slayage thing, in general. Giles, I’m a murderer. I’m the police officer in a minority neighborhood. I’m the guy with the billy-club who moves in and sometimes just makes things worse; like in the Rodney King video…”

“Buffy, what on Earth…”

“I’m the person,” she went on, firmly riding over Giles’ alarmed protests, “who causes the demons to come up with a bunch of criminal activity half the time just to get by, the reason they have to resort to illegal trades and to cook up weird economies to avoid me; because I might put the beat-down on them if I’m having a bad day, or if I think they look funny, or if I misunderstand a cultural practice. They don’t even have to be doing anything specifically dangerous. I used to tell myself I was all ‘innocent until proven guilty’ with demons, but that was never how I looked at them; how I was taught to look at them. It was actually ‘guilty till proven murderous’, and I had a license to kill any one of them, or even just tee off on them if I felt like it.”

Spike was leaning back now, elbow on the table, and was looking at her as if _he_ had never seen her before. “Bloody hell, Slayer, where is this coming from?”

She returned his gaze till he nodded, slowly, acknowledging.

“Buffy?” Giles asked, sounding deeply rattled. 

“I beat up one vampire, on the daily, because I was angry at another one.” She turned her gaze back to Giles, grim. “I beat up demons who never did a thing to me, or anyone else, I told myself to get information, but really it was because I was mad that they existed. Because the fact that they existed meant _I_ had to exist. I had to be the Slayer. I patrolled around and killed demons for walking along minding their own business, when just fighting them and leaving would have worked as well; like walking with a sword obviously meant they were up to no good. In my mind, their existence, even without proof of wrongdoing, deserved a death-sentence…”

“Buffy, we did the research…”

“And in those cases,” Buffy interrupted again, “the apocalyptic ones, and the ones where there was clear baby-snatching or whatever, yes. It was justified. And yeah. Maybe the ones just walking around were up to no good, too. I had no _proof_ , though.” /Bad cop of the Sunnydale underworld, and I never once stopped to ask./ “I was in no danger when they attacked me one-on-one. They attacked me most of the time because they knew _they_ were in danger. Because I could kill them any second. Because they knew I _would_ , without asking a single question, and without remorse. Because I was the apex predator; the Big Bad they all feared. That their children all feared would take their parents away. I was the reason dad might never come home that night, and there’d never be a reason why he was… just gone.”

Giles’ voice was shaken, weak. “Buffy…”

She held up a hand. “Giles, I’ll never know if some of them ever meant to do anything wrong. I killed them and I killed them and thought I was righteous; and yes. Most of them were hopped up on hellmouth-juice—and maybe so was I—and who knows? Maybe a lot of ‘em _were_ up to no good. But some of them… I’ll never know. Because it never occurred to me to stop to ask. I was like the army in an occupied zone, shooting into a house, you know? Some of those people in there were probably insurgents, or visiting rowdies; but maybe one or two were just innocent bystanders on their way home to dinner, and as far as I cared, it didn’t matter. They were all the same, right? Just demons.” She closed her eyes briefly. “Someone’s sister. Someone’s mother. Someone’s friend.”

Spike’s hand fell over hers, squeezed tight. “You can’t do this to yourself, pet. Like you said; most were up to no good, or I wouldn’t’ve been right there by your side, helpin’. If you stop to think every time, you’re gonna end up dead. That’s why we left the fold; so the bits don’t end up hesitating.”

“I know,” she whispered. “But I can’t, anymore. Not after Gris…”

“Buffy, Spike’s right. You can’t…”

She opened her eyes to pin her Watcher firmly with her gaze. “I got to know a lot of demons in Hell-A, Giles. I got very close with them. I fought alongside them. Some of them died in my arms. And I learned that you measure people by their actions. You don’t measure people by whether they’re human. Not even by whether they have a soul; a human soul, _or_ a demon soul…” She pinned him hard, then, her gaze uncompromising. “There _are_ demon souls, right, by the way? I remember you mentioning it once, way back when I was first learning about how the vampire race started, but it was like we never mentioned it again. Like human souls were the only ones that really counted or even existed, and if you didn’t have one of those, you were just worthless…”

Giles blanched again, but she could feel Spike swelling next to her, like he had grown two sizes. 

“But if all demons were automatically evil, then how did becoming part-demon make me the Slayer; fighter for all that’s good? How did it put Cordelia in line to become the PTB’s messenger and make it so she could end up becoming a permanent member?”

Giles looked a little like someone who’d been punched in the stomach as he stammered his justification. “I… Well, obviously there are differences between the higher beings and the lower beings. Most daimon…”

/Really, no./ “Which, of course, means, that when we talk about ‘the essence’ that’s all mixed up in me, I probably really kind of have _two_ souls…” Buffy pinned her former Watcher with a fiercely pointed glare. “Which would really explain a lot about why I’ve felt pulled in two different directions since I was Called.” /You’re not gonna get out of this, Giles, so stop trying./

Giles remained silent, mouth hanging open and clearly unable or unwilling to weigh in on this question; as if to do so would be to make it real. 

It was enough. Buffy tilted her head slightly in a move she might honestly have picked up from Spike, nodded. “Words like ‘essence’ are pretty convenient, aren’t they?” Disgust pervaded. “Man. That Council of yours was real good at semantics. And they used fancy words like crazy to twist us up when the little Slayers were just confused kids with no idea what we were…”

Giles found his voice. “Buffy, I honestly never considered…” He broke off, sounding choked… but it was good to know, by his very shock, that he hadn’t done brainwashed her completely on purpose. 

“You’re a soddin’ _scholar_ , Rupert,” Spike scolded in his turn. “Think that means you just didn’t _want_ to know, innit?”

Giles remained poleaxed for a moment, then shook his head hard. “Still,” he answered, and straightened, firming up his tones and squaring his shoulders, “there _are_ higher and lower beings. Even if Slayers have… are, ah, two-natured, like vengeance-demons, or…” Another choking noise, as if he found the very thought difficult to swallow. “Buffy, you cannot simply assume that this means you have a… A _kinship_ with every…” Another horrified head-shake. “That’s why we have _books_ , and…”

Buffy felt she’d given him enough digestion-time for the moment, and tilted her head at him again. “Books written by the same guys who insisted that vampires can’t love?” she pointed out sharply.

Giles opened his mouth. His face suffused with blood. He looked as if he were about to begin that argument all over again, right to Spike’s face, and _no_. She simply wasn’t going to let him go there. “I don’t trust the literature we have, Giles,” she told him flatly. “I think it was written by a bunch of human-centric jerks with an agenda, who never bothered to question or revisit anything and just kept parroting the same stuff over and over again without wondering if any of it might change. No questions about if the species they were talking about might have evolved, or if their info might be wrong. I’m planning on getting my own information.” /And, okay, does that make me a Watcher? Because, ugh./ So not something she was going to ever think about. “I’ve already gotten a pretty good start, in Hell-A, and even back in Sunnydale, now that I’ve opened my eyes to some of the stuff I learned there. And I have a great tour guide on my side.”

Spike squeezed her hand tight, his entire being swelling with something that might have been awe. “It’s long past time the library got shaken up a little, got some new entries,” she told the dismayed Giles quietly. And felt words fall out of her face, out of nowhere, without having realized before this moment that she had even considered them. “There are too many Slayers out there now for them to be functioning in the world off of misinformation based off of a war that might not even need to keep going on. I mean, we share this world with demonkind. Maybe we can try a new… what’s the word? Paradigm, instead of just doing the same thing we’ve been doing since the war started.” And sudden chills were dancing up and down her arms now, and oh, damn, damn, this was one of those moments where something was _happening,_ which _..._ /Damn, _dammit_ Cordelia, is _this_ what you meant by They aren’t done with me yet?/

Giles couldn’t have been more stunned if she had hit him with a troll hammer. “Buffy, that’s all very… ambitious of you, and definitely quite admirable, but it’s a highly unlikely goal. Certainly there are a few harmless demon species out there, but taken as a whole…”

Buffy answered, feeling above herself, as if she were speaking from a great distance. “We don’t know much, do we? Because we just assume.” These moments were so weird; like she was speaking her own mind, but also being spoken _through_. “And people act the way we assume they should, because we don’t give them the room to do anything else.” /C’mon, Buffy, shake it off./ Covering Spike’s hand with her own, she drew in a deep breath, found their link… and anchored herself in the very physical connection there. And _slammed_ back into her body, into his eyes. Very abruptly, her words were her own again. “I mean, look at what we did to Spike for all those years.” 

A low rumble of startled agreement from her guy, and she felt him tremble slightly. She was definitely throwing both guys for a loop right now. Which was fair enough, since she was pretty thrown herself, right now.

“But Buffy… there are quite simply certain behaviors which one cannot expect to see change, when one is talking about creatures who are soulless…”

/Okay, you know what?/ Her Watcher’s words would have torn her away from the look in her mate’s eyes, but she needed to say it first to Spike. “I’m not even going to go back and re-qualify that whole ‘soulless’ thing again. I’m just gonna remind you that we saw that change very up close and personal, for years, right here.” This was so not up for negotiation, with her. She was going to fight for her vampire, and for what he represented, the way she had not before. 

Spike’s eyes on hers were depthless, warm, grateful for the recognition, the credit given, even if it was years belated.

Buffy forced her gaze over to Giles’, then. “And anyway, I think ‘demon’ has been a super catch-all term for us for a long time, but we always assumed it means, like, total badness and the opposite of ‘soul-having’, and ‘soul’ has been this catch-all term for all of the good, and all things human. But that’s not how it really is, is it? Demons can have souls and they can be good even without human ones, and humans have souls and can be evil bastards, and that shoots the whole system all to hell, right? Because we all know,” she went on quietly, “that not all human souls are that great. Warren taught us that.”

“Buffy…”

She leaned forward and pinned her Watcher with a glare. “Tell me who you think you’d pick to hang out with, Giles. Really. Warren, or Spike, even before his visit to Africa.”

Giles sat back a little, expression going exceedingly grim. He didn’t answer, but it was clear he didn’t at all like being put on the spot like that.

“These,” Buffy pushed on firmly, “are the questions I’ve had to face. And I’ve realized… that maybe I was _designed_ to protect humanity, but that’s not my measure of a person’s worth anymore; just if they’re human. That’s not where the buck stops anymore; at least not for me. I can’t live anymore with just that for my measure of worth. Which means…” She let him see it in her eyes. The finality. “I’m not your Slayer. Not now. I’m… not a sheepdog anymore, Giles, if I ever was one.” She picked up her fork once more, stabbed at her now very cold eggs, and made a face at them. “I’m not sure what I am, but I’ll do what I can when I can.” She hadn’t even realized the idea had formed in her mind till this moment, but it just really made sense. / _Fine_ , Cordelia. I guess I can do that much./ “And what I can do is be a liaison, now I’ve divorced myself from the Organization. That’s how I’ll be of the most use…”

“Buffy…”

“Don’t worry, Giles,” she told her father-figure quietly. “I’m still on-call for actual, black-and-white apocalypses.” /Mostly because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself./

Spike’s hand, covering hers once more; a gesture of solidarity and understanding, but she could feel his awe through their link, through his touch, as the meaning of her words, her new resolve, percolated. 

She sobered a little, kept her gaze firm on the man she had thought of as a replacement father. “But that’s all. The ones where it’s straightforward. The ones where I do the work, or the world ends.” She set down her fork again, aware that she had finally, very firmly drawn her own line, with the one person with whom it had ever really counted. There was no more going back from this point. “Other than that,” she finished softly, “I think I just need a break from thinking about it. A chance to just be _me_. Buffy. To pick and choose my battles, my way. Or to not.” She lifted Spike’s hand in hers, folded their fingers together in a little hand-dance, wove them with his, met his eyes. “And find my own lines.” 

“Maybe this is what it means to surpass being the Slayer, Love,” Spike answered her look quietly, and lifted her hand the rest of the way to kiss her knuckles gently. She could feel in the humming of his hand on hers that he was bursting with pride in her. 

He was _proud_ of her. For trying. Trying to see the big picture, and for attempting to navigate something so complex. Because she wasn’t trying to dumb it down anymore, close her eyes to the nuances, oversimplify it to make it easier on herself. 

But at what cost? 

She knew Spike would back her in her new, self-stated (possibly Powers-given?) goal; to the ends of the earth if necessary, because he knew she was crap at sitting still. Heck, he was too. Maybe it would be enough to keep her from losing her mind as she struggled with the insane tangle of new definitions.

Giles was not so much with the proud. He was probably horrified, or disappointed, or just completely thrown, but she felt kind of too exhausted to care right now. “Oh, speaking of surpassing being a Slayer,” she managed, mostly because she wanted her Watcher—or was he her ex-Watcher, now?—off of the subject of her failure to live up to his hopes and dreams. “How good were the Council’s records of Potentials back in the 1800’s? Because if they missed me in the nineties…”

Spike tensed, watching Giles, who was blinking and nonplussed at the swift swerve in tacks. “The… Ah… I believe they did their best. They had a goodly number of field agents about, armed with locating spells, but no doubt any number slipped through the cracks. Of course, once any one girl was Called, she was located instantly via the main Slayer-Locator spell, which sounded at Headquarters, and they promptly dispatched the nearest Watcher to find her…”

Buffy turned her gaze on Spike, awed. “So they could easily have missed her.”

“Bloody hell,” he breathed, stunned.

“Missed who, if you don’t mind?”

The bombshell would most definitely get Giles off the subject of all things Buffy for a little while. “Drusilla. We think she was a Potential before Angelus got ahold of her. It would explain her visions. ‘The Sight’. And the way they kept coming after she was sired, in waking trances, like meditations. In dreams…”

“Oh, Good Lord.”

“And the way she was always super-strong, even for a vamp, but kind of conflicted, like something’s driving her crazy. Like her very nature always seems to be tearing her apart. And she can thrall people really well, considering she’s nowhere near Drac’s age…”

“Yes, I’d noticed,” Giles interjected dryly. “My God, I’d never considered the possibility. Never thought what might happen if a Potential were to be sired, but it isn’t even all that outlandish a theory. Potentials abounded. For all we know she might even have been a Slayer who’d been turned. There were reports of some who were missed…”

It was Spike’s turn to stare as if Giles had transfixed him with something sharp and wicked. “Come again, Watcher?”

“It wasn’t unheard of, back then. They didn’t want to talk about it, but there were cock-ups here and there. Girls who were lost between being Called and the Watcher being sent to pick her up, because their potential had been missed. And if Angelus was right there, haunting her…” He pinched the bridge of his nose over the top of his glasses, looking pained. “After all, another girl would have been Called right away, wouldn’t there? So no skin off their noses if they missed one, isn’t it?”

Spike lowered his head very slowly to the table.

Buffy felt a shudder work up her spine at the very thought of being sired when she was still confused about what was going on. Just wandering through her life, that sudden surge of energy rolling through her being, all those insane dreams, the confused urge to do something— _anything_ —all the time… And Drusilla had been a devout girl. She would have thought all those urges were something sent by the devil or something, would have been on her knees all the time, repenting, half crazy already from it. And then…

Angelus. And two demons, and nothing left of her human self at all. Just a serious demon up front, and another demon-y sort of being, sitting there trapped in the back seat. Or maybe, even worse, she had _three_ beings crammed in there in some totally unnatural, overcrowded state, like a tenement or some other insanely overpopulated bit of real estate, with whatever was left of her tormented, cowering, insane human huddled in some corner trying to avoid the war between her two completely different vamp-style demon Conduits as they spent the next hundred and fifty or so years being used by two different sources and tearing each other—and her—apart. 

Pity was a sickening wash in Buffy’s being. She never thought she’d feel so bad for Spike’s demented sire, but Miss Bags o’Crazy totally came by it honestly. / _God_./ “What kind of demon do you think would be attracted to a Slayer, if she was sired?”

Giles cleared his throat. “I would imagine an exceedingly powerful one. And probably one who was quite oracular. And no doubt thoroughly mad in its own right, to want to pair itself to a being already possessed of its own demonic essence...”

Still on the table, Spike groaned.

“And… um, how different do you think the childe of that demon would be, when she sired her own little baby vampire? Since vamp traits run in families?”

Spike’s head jerked up like she’d pulled a marionette string. “Bloody hell,” he repeated.

Giles eyed her guy with interest. “You’ve just become quite the riddle, Spike. For one thing, your fascination with Slayers might not be entirely your fault…”

“We already thought of _that_ ,” he answered grimly, but his fingertips were digging into the table, now.

“And, for another, as vampires go, you’re a bit of an odd duck.”

“Ta, Watcher.”

“Well.” Giles pushed himself back on his bench and eyed them with interest. “This has certainly been… educational. I believe I have a few things to put into my notes, if nothing else.”

/Of course you do./ At least, if nothing else, she had provided her Watcher with a lifetime’s worth of excellent journaling material. /You haven’t even seen the new manual./ That was going to make him blow a gasket.

She wondered what he thought of her now. If he despised her, if he didn’t love her anymore, or… The sinking feeling that thought brought was still new and painful, despite the long distance that had grown up between them, and god. She hadn’t realized how badly she still wanted Giles’ approval, till she found herself scanning his face. That moment when he had told her how proud he was of her had filled her up beyond any imagining. It hurt like hell to dash it with cold reality, but it had had to be done. And now. Now he was probably wondering where he’d gone wrong with her or something. 

His face was closed, distant. He had his research mask on, like she was more… something to study than the girl he’d half-raised. It was the same expression he’d worn when he’d come back with the first Potentials. That distant thing that said that she had somehow let him down at some point, and he was going to stay a few steps back from now on, treat her like a disappointing Slayer and not a daughter anymore. Which, okay, considering their whole conversation about Spike before, and the big rant about sacrifices and choices, maybe he thought she was letting herself be clouded, but he’d also said she’d replaced herself, earned her freedom…

/He also told me I had to put the mission before Dawnie, back with Glory, though. And there was _no_ way… Oh./

Did he really think she’d stopped being Slayer enough when she’d started putting _Dawn_ first? Because how was that _her_ fault? She hadn’t chosen to have the Key to the end of the world turned into her sister, made from her own flesh like Dawn was practically her own child or something! And she’d sacrificed herself at the end instead… and then it was like he hadn’t been able to deal, like it was the thing with the Master all over again, way back when he had first decided to practically adopt her and tried to go fight the jerk in her stead so she could live. She had died anyway, that first time, despite his resolve, but that time she had come back. The second…

Had he felt guilt, like he’d goaded her into killing herself out of duty to the world, because of what he’d said about Dawn? Is that why he’d left? /But then why did you say the thing with Spike, when you knew that I needed him just to keep _going?_ /

Except… She hadn’t told him that. She hadn’t told _anyone_ that. And now Giles was looking at her that same way again; all disappointed and let down and… like she was an experiment gone wrong. Like he had disowned her, and…

It was pretty incredibly painful. And, really… where did he get off, acting like she’d betrayed _him_ , when he’d been the one to break it off first? /Once upon a time, I trusted you with everything I had in me./ And, arguably, he had been the one who had broken her trust the most completely, so how could he just sit there and… _judge_ her, now, like she was so awful for just living her life to the best of her ability? For facing _reality_ —the reality his stupid Council had hidden from her all her Slaying life—like it was so much better if she just pretended the lie was real and just kept on living in a stupid fairytale forever. /Yeah, Giles. The good guys are always, what was it? ‘Stalwart and true’, and the bad guys are easy to pick out by their pointy horns and black hats, and we always knock them out and save the day. No one ever dies, everyone lives happily ever after… Except I didn’t believe that even back in high school, so how do you think I’m going to believe it _now?_ /

Spike was watching her with concern, sitting once more astride the bench facing her. His hand slipped to her thigh. “Eggs have gone cold, luv.”

She exhaled heavily. “Yeah.”

“Best at least have at the coffee, then, and maybe the scone.”

/Always trying to keep me fed./ Rolling her head absently on her neck again, she fumbled blindly for the coffee cup and took a sip. And felt his cool hand slip up to knead at the column of her neck muscles. “Thanks.”

“Always.” A short silence, then, “You alright here for a tick?”

That pulled her out of her blue study. “What? Why?”

Spike’s eyes weren’t on her. They were instead focused, blue and intent, across the table on Giles. “Got something needs to be said between me and the Watcher.”

***  
  
  
  
  
  
What oh what do we think Spike and Giles need to discuss amongst themselves? Find out next time!!!   
  
(BTW, sadly, I couldn't squeeze into this one why Spike knows who Kralik is, but if you're reading the other series, he'll mention the reason for that one in there.)  
  
  



	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> RL continues to be evil, but I will strive to stay on something like a posting schedule for you all. 
> 
> Here we have Spike's private conversation with Giles, among other things. We shall see what everyone thinks.

**S:**

The tension had mounted to a palpable thing between himself and ol’ Rupes, there. Buffy had missed it, of course. Granted, it was a bit diffuse, still… but it was clear that should Watcher wish to find a target for his frustration, his fears, they were most like to fall on yours truly. 

/Well and good. Keep it off the girl. She doesn’t need to hear it. Had enough, she has. From you, from the world. Doesn’t need another old man disapproving of her an’ all./ 

Right now Rupes was still probably wondering where he had gone wrong with his girl and all that foolery. Which was nonsense. Things hadn’t been right between them for a long while; at least since he had left her. Maybe before, judging from that unbelievable tosh with this crucible bit they’d done to his Slayer, the fucking sod.

That this man had participated in such a debacle was utterly beyond Spike’s comprehension. /I thought you loved the girl, you complete rubbish./

Laughable, considering all these betrayals, that the Watcher thought he had any ground to stand on going off on anyone else when it came to turning Buffy’s head inside out, but it was clear from the way the man had looked at him on and off throughout that he blamed Spike for much of their girl’s current state of mind. As if a sharp creature like the Slayer wouldn’t have figured out her own nature in the end, whether she’d taken up with him again or no. But if Rupes wanted to blame it all on Spike, he was welcome to it. /Not like we’ve ever been best mates, and English camaraderie be damned./ Whatever goodwill they might have built in that brief interim during Buffy’s short death had withered swiftly thereafter, and definitely since the tosser had plotted with Wood to have him offed.

He rather suspected there was a simple explanation for all that. Watcher didn’t like that a vamp had managed to gain greater influence over Buffy than he’d done. /That’s the rub, innit? Trouble is, I was there and you weren’t, you old fool. Can’t bloody help it if you dug your own grave. The girl’s gonna rely on the ones who stay. Simple bloody math./ Because for Buffy, it was. /She’s like a vamp, that way, whether you’ll want to hear it or not./

Best to have it over. It had been hanging about their heads like a sodding cloud for years, and long since time to have done with it. It was no skin off his nose any road, since nothing Rupes could say to him anymore might make a single dent. Not with what he and Buffy had shared in the last few months. He couldn’t imagine the old fool saying anything that could shake his confidence in that regard. /Wouldn’t have been the case, once, but now?/ The pillock could say what he wanted. Get it all right off his chest. 

/Makes no bloody difference one way or the other. If it doesn’t change things for her… then it sure as Christ doesn’t change a sodding thing for me./ And it hadn’t.

Giles’ approval, or lack thereof, hadn’t changed a single bloody thing for Buffy as pertained to him, Spike. Yet again, she had chosen him. 

Would it ever cease to amaze him that she continued to do that? /Christ, get a bloody soul for a girl and she’ll go to the ends of the sodding Earth for you./ Made it worth even that fucking travail.

Well, best get it done while he was still armed for battle, and before Buffy decided the entire thing was liable to put her back up. His pronouncement had already sent suspicious sparks into her eyes. It wasn’t exactly a sign of connubial bliss in the making. 

He kept his eyes decidedly focused on the Watcher and not on his mate as he pushed himself to his feet. “Coming, Rupes?” His tones were genial, if quietly unyielding.

Giles set aside his fork in an exceedingly precise manner, and came very slowly to his feet. “Yes, I think that’s wise. Buffy, we’ll be just a minute.”

Sparks weren’t in it. Buffy’s eyes were a conflagration on them now, burning from Giles back to Spike again, hard and angry. “What the hell is going on?” she hissed. And she started to her feet as well.

How the bloody hell to manage this?

It was a spur of the moment thing, but he decided it was the better part of valor not to catch her arm, and instead pulled her aside by dint of a quiet look, filled with entreaty. It unbent her enough that she followed him to one side. “Spike, what…”

“Just trust me. There’s somethin’ between us needs to be settled…”

She crossed her arms. It wasn’t looking good. “You’re kidding me right now.”

/Fuck./ Well, alright, this was going to smart, later, and he would pay for it; most likely in blood. But it had to be done. “I’m asking you, Buffy. Please, don’t follow.”

She stared at him as if he’d lost his mind… and then, without a word, she turned sharply away and sat back down on the bench. But she was rigid as he had ever seen her, and the feel of her in his blood… was utterly closed off. 

/Fuck you, Rupert. You’re costing us a whole bloody lot, you know that?/ 

Still. It was what had to be. He would just have to do right by her after. Grovel properly and pick up the sodding pieces. Because this had needed to happen for a long bloody time, and it had never gotten to; at first because Giles had been gone when they had started things, and then because the old fool hadn’t taken it seriously when he’d first come back. And after that… because the git had taken the road of trying to off him with Wood instead of having a chat. But they needed to have themselves the man-to-man about it and get it done and over with, finally, because at this point it was just becoming an intolerable situation; and it was hurting Buffy. And that was just not done. 

So, though it felt a bit of a betrayal to do it, he turned away from his girl right now to lead the way out the door, the old fool just a step behind him.

They matched treads all the way out to some battered, west-facing gallery halfway around the wing and well out of Buffy’s earshot before he stopped, stood in the indirect twilight that was very early morning facing another side of the large chateau. He could already smell the change in the air, the particles around him warming, moving faster as the air heated infinitesimally. Christ, sunrise came early here in the wild white north in summer. He'd forgotten.

It was a decent enough spot. Girding his figurative loins, he turned. Leaned back against the cool wall; greystone sheathed in plaster. Shoved his hands into his duster pockets, let even his head settle against the hard surface till he was eyeing the lined face of his countryman from under lazy lids. “Alright then,” he began, and let the slow challenge of it show in his voice. “Go ahead and say it, Rupert. Get it out of your system. Tell me. Tell me what you want to do to me. Get it off your chest, yeah?” Might as well start the thing off swiftly and have done. Faster the powder keg went off, the sooner he could get back to Buffy and start in on the necessary damage control.

Giles faced him in much the same manner; hands in pockets, though head down for a moment; almost contemplative. But at this, his countenance rose. And his eyes were blazing. “You want me to tell me what I think of you? You really want me to cut loose?” It came out in almost curious tones.

This was going to be good. He could _feel_ it, and bloody hell, the energy almost made Spike want to bounce on his heels with the static potential hovering between them. The scent of blood waiting to fall. The old motor revving; the throttle-turn of impending violence. Any moment, one of them would let off the clutch.

He almost wanted the tosser to break; to swing. He’d not swing back. This was for a purpose, after all. “Yeah, go on then. Say it. Say bloody all of it. Go to!”

Giles broke; rather sooner than he’d expected, actually. Swung round, grabbed him by the lapels and slammed him against the opposite wall. Which was about what he had expected, and he made not a move one to break away. Actually it was quite amusing, and he let the bloke get his fatherly rocks off, blow off his frustrated steam. “Then I’ll say it,” the old fool ground out. “I’ve never liked you. I think you’re a damned disappointment to the British race. You’re an arrogant, lazy git who’s cast off every ounce of class you ever had to make a mockery of us. And look at you! You’ve ruined a perfectly wonderful Slayer…”

/Oh, like that, is it?/ “Had some help with that…” Also, when had the old git realized he’d ever had any class to cast off in the first place? Had he been that transparent?

Rupes’ face twisted. “Oh, believe you me, I’m well aware. And I didn’t like Angel much for her either. Thought he was a right knob, but at least he didn’t drag her through the damned mud. You do and you _revel_ in it…”

Spike smirked a bit; because it was expected of him, and because it would wind the tosser up worse. “Girl likes the dark side, Rupert. Ask her.”

The broad, lined face suffused with blood. “Shut your gob, you… sodding prick.”

/Well _alright_ then!/ “Good on you, Watcher. Never knew you had it in you! Go on then. Get it all out!” He was starting to enjoy this.

Giles got right into his face then, red as a tomato. “I know I can’t stop her doing what she wants. I couldn’t stop her seeing Angel, no matter how badly that ended, and I can’t stop her casting her lot in with you, even though it’s clearly turning her upside down and tearing her apart. But I tell you this, and I’ll only tell it to you once. If you _ever_ hurt her. And I mean _ever_ …”

_“Yeah!_ Go on then…”

Giles didn’t need the encouragement. His voice had dropped to something truly deadly. “I _will_ find you. Find where you sleep. No hole deep enough, you fucking sod. And I _will_ end you. I will make it slow, and painful. I will use the worst magicks I ever learned to bring you back over and over again, and in the end I will stake you so slowly that you will feel the dust flake away from your body molecule by molecule.”

The man had poetry. Spike could appreciate that. “You know… I still think you’re an impotent git, but I have to respect invention when I hear it. That was right up with something Angelus would’ve said.”

That brassed him off no end. “Now you listen to me, you rubbish...”

“No. Now, you’ve had your say, Rupert, and I reckon it’s my turn.” Leaning his head back and making no move to knock the white-knuckled fists off his lapels, he shrugged easily. “Been dead already.” /Three times, now, not countin’ the first. In the running with the Slayer an’ all./ And wasn’t that a revelation. “Been dust. Doesn’t scare me. But. I appreciate what you’re saying. More than you know, actually, and I’m glad to know you still care that much. Buffy needs that, yeah?”

The brick-red color in the Watcher’s face went mottled, starting to drain. Seeing the advantage in his side, Spike pursued his line of reasoning with quiet logic, calm and unruffled. Sometimes having the soul riding in the coach-seat of his being helped a bit, holding the reins of his head-tossing, pawing, nostrils-flaring demonside was a useful thing. Otherwise, if the 'horses', as it were, had control of his being, he'd already be brawling. Not hardly useful, in the current situation. “And I’m glad you don’t want her hurt. God knows she’s been hurt enough; by you, by me, by the bleedin’ world.” 

There it was. The wince. The regret and the shame of it; the acknowledgment that there was guilt enough to go around, as far as that went. Excellent. Now they were getting somewhere. “But the fact is… we’ve hurt each other, she and I, already, and far more than you can imagine. Think we’ve got it all out of our systems; or at least I hope so. We’re working hard to make that our goal, yeah? Not to hurt each other anymore.” Slipping his hand down around the other man’s arm, he rummaged in his front pocket and managed to prize out his pack of fags and lighter, tugged one out and flicked open the silver contraption. “Been a lot of bloody work, but it’s worth it. Worth every minute to try to rebuild, and fix what was broken to start. Which was half the reason she came and got me, yeah, when I thought it was the better part of valor to just stay away, let her live her life? Because it was time we went back over all that. Found out why we’d made a right mess of it all, and see if there was something there worth mending.”

With a low curse and a stricken expression, Giles released him abruptly and moved over to the nearest stone bench, whereupon he sat heavily and lowered his face into his hands. “I’m too bloody old for all this.”

Moving away from the wall, Spike tugged out a second fag and, taking pity on the man, held it out. “Need to feel young again for a mo’?”

That earned him a quick, jaundiced glance from the corner of lined, hazel eyes, but then with a snort of surrender, Watcher took the fag and leaned back against the wall under the fancy embrasure, looking beat all to hell and old as the dickens. Spike took the moment as read and sat beside him. Lit up and then handed the still-lit Zippo to him. With only the briefest pause Giles lit up as well and closed it, then handed it tiredly back. Dropped his head back against the wall, pulling in smoke with a low groan and a tiny cough that said he hadn’t had a fag in ages. “This is damnably hard,” he commented after a moment’s exhale. 

“Got to let them go sometime, you know,” Spike reminded him quietly. “I know when Dawn finally leaves the house I’ll be petrified.”

That earned him a sharp, muddy glare full of ambivalence. “Since when do you feel all parental of Dawn?”

Spike shot him an incredulous glance from under his lashes. “Where the bloody hell have you been?”

Leaning forward, Giles snorted dismissively into his cupped hands, and stared at the end of his fag like it was hypnotic. He really wasn’t smoking it so much as just watching it burn. Damned waste. 

“The thing is,” Spike pointed out, philosophically enough, he thought, “they grow up sometime and you have to let them go, yeah?”

“And let them take up with bloody killers?” Giles demanded, turning his head to glare at him.

Well, that was rather rude. “Not killing anyone anymore, am I?” he demanded defensively.

“That’s debatable. You’re back on the blood again, isn’t it?”

/Oh, hell. That it, then?/ “What part of having a soul don’t you understand, Rupert? And even when I didn’t have the sodding thing I had to talk myself up to it. Had to do a whole bloody song and dance to work myself up to the job. Even then, couldn’t do it; not with thinkin’ of her face the whole time, and what she’d think.” He sighed and pulled in a long drag to settle his nerves of the memory. Clear his head. “She’s long since ruined me for all that, whatever you might think.” /And I think that deserves a bit of celebration/ he thought sardonically. /Have another long one, Spike. Don’t mind if I bloody do…/

Giles grunted. “And you ruined _her_.” 

Hurt to hear it, wondering. Still, he was man enough to admit it. “Yeah, maybe so. Can’t say as it hasn’t crossed my mind.” He let out a plume of smoke long held in dead lungs. “Seems we’ll go be ruined together, somewhere far away where there’s somewhere half a vamp and a mucked-up Slayer can find a home, and if there’s an apocalypse you’ll ring us up.” He rolled his head a bit in the old man’s direction. “The girl deserves a vacation anyway. She’s earned it, and you and I both know it.”

Rupert sighed and scrubbed one hand over his lined face. “I suppose that’s true. And it’s all well and good you saying you want to be there for her while she finds her way through it…” He shot Spike an oddly weary look from the corners of his eyes. “But I don’t mind saying I don’t know that I trust you entirely. Also, I don’t honestly care in the long run what you’ve done to earn your way back into her good graces. I don’t care how many lives you’ve saved on balance, or your crusade to prove you’ve earned that bloody soul. I don’t give a toss what you’ve done or haven’t done.” He humped up again over his borrowed fag. “You’re a gormless tit and you always will be, and you’re going to cock this up sooner or later. And I just hope I’m there to pick up the pieces.”

Well, that was straightforward enough. “Nice to know you care, Watcher. Thanks for the bloody telegram.” He leaned back against the wall, frowning. “You know what I think?”

“Not really interested, thanks all the same.”

“Well, you’re gonna hear it anyway. I think you hate that she’ll pick me over you to listen to any road.” 

Giles’ head jerked over to stare at Spike, and he smirked as he lifted the fag to his lips, spoke around it. “That’s it, innit? Once upon a time she might have picked you over Angel even; or at least she would have hesitated. But now that’s not even a question, and it drives you right barmy.” 

“Rot. She’s _here_ , you twat. She still needs me…”

/Grasping at straws./ It was actually a bit sad. “To look things up in the books for her. She never was one for the research. Never had the bleedin’ time. She was too busy tryin’ to stay alive’; for all the bloody good it did her.” Spike flicked his fag-end to the ground with two fingers and scoffed out his last vestiges of smoke as he scuffed the ember to death beneath his boot. “It isn’t even me that’s making you angry, entirely, and you know it. She’d have figured out her nature eventually anyway…”

The half-burnt cigarette was cast to the floor in a fit of reinvigorated rage. “She needn’t have explored any of this long enough to have become so blasted confused about her role in the world, if it wasn’t for you! This all comes of her taking up with you, and _you_ know it!” 

Hell. He’d only had one drag from the thing. /What I get for bein’ all matey with the prat./ “Maybe. But I doubt it. I think she would have done, without me.” Leaning over, he scuffed out the wasted half a fag and then sat back to lean against the wall, about done with Watcher’s temper-tantrum. “Buffy’s always been good at fooling herself for a long while… but there’s only so long she can lie once it starts interfering with her ability to do the work.” 

That must have struck a nerve. Watcher wouldn’t look at him. Accordingly, Spike turned half an eye on the struggling old fool, pinned him with it. /Not getting’ away from this one, Rupes./ “How many Slayers you know have died and come back from it; much less three sodding times? Shite’s bound to leave its mark on her psyche. ‘Course she’s gonna figure it out sooner or later. You honestly going to say it took shaggin’ me to put that together? Because if you are, then you don’t know the bird as well as you ought.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair in exasperation… and became in that moment abruptly aware that sometime in the last several hours of the drive Buffy had managed to get the bloody mousse loose in it again. It was all over curls once more. /Christ, I’ve been facing down the fucking Watcher like this? Dammit, Buffy!/ He needed to get back to using gel so he mightn’t go about with egg on his face over the business so bloody often. /Just have to figure out where she’s hidden the stuff./ “Wouldn’t think you of all people would underestimate her to that degree, Rupert.” /God knows I need to stop underestimating her ability to get her hands in my hair at any bleeding opportunity!/ 

A protracted silence fell, percolating between them. When Giles finally spoke, it was in defeated tones. “It hardly matters anymore, does it? She’s decided to question everything. She’s turned to you for answers; or at least decided that being with you asks the right questions. And if that gives her peace right now, well and good. But you know where I stand. I don’t like it in the slightest. I think you’re the worst thing for her in the long run, and I always have. I hope to God she survives this latest assault on her identity intact, because that’s all I’ve ever hoped for her.” He sighed heavily and pushed himself to his feet. “And I still think you haven’t changed. You’ll take any opportunity you can get to slot yourself into her life, no matter how selfish, so long as it gets you what you want. No matter what it does to her.”

Spike nodded. It was about what he had expected. And once upon a time, he might even have feared the man was right on some level. 

He knew better now. Knew what he had done—and proved—by staying away. Knew what he and Buffy had now; knew that it was reciprocal, and mutual, and fucking untouchable by anyone outside of them. “You can’t speak to what you don’t know, so I’ll let that go.” Coming to his feet as well, he tilted his head back the way they had come. “S’pose this concludes the necessary pleasantries? See you at Christmas and all that rot?”

That earned him a hard snort of amusement. “Right. If you’re still in the picture by then, I suppose I’ll have to put up with you. I’ll not put a cross in the pudding. For Buffy’s sake.”

“Ta for that.” /The sarcasm twins, you could call us./

It wasn’t all handshakes and manly backslaps, but it would have to do.

Now to see to it that Buffy wouldn’t take his head off for having taken the moment. If she was even still in the room. He might have to go hunt her down to make his case.

One last bit of business to settle, though, while he had the old plonker alone. Turning half back, he asked it, since it might as well do to reveal any weakness he had for future reference. “What makes you think I’ve ever had any class to cast off, anyway?”

Eyeing Spike from where he remained seated on the stone bench, the old Watcher pulled a sour face, folded the remains of his fag in his hand where he’d retrieved it from the stones, then sighed and stood. “Oh, come now, man. We both know that Hackney bit you do is put on. You’re no native Londoner. Been trying to place what’s underneath from the start. Still haven’t managed it, but it’s clear you were educated. I’ll wager your Council bio’s a load of toff.”

Spike tensed, but did not reply. /Bloody hell./

Watcher pinned him with a gimlet glare. “Isn’t it, then?”

Turning on his heel, Spike did not favor him with a response. He had to see about his woman.

Behind him he thought he heard a huff of amusement from his countryman. Damn the man.  
  
They re-entered the homely dining area in the same order as they’d left it, found Buffy still there; eating her food in a determined manner, as if it had personally offended her, with fury rolling off of her in near-visible waves. Spike could damn near see the smoke floating from her ears, like some sort of cartoon character. 

As Giles left him to round the table back to his abandoned tea and scones, flaring green eyes turned to him. And the bond between them snapped back into place, hard. And burned like acid. /Christ, I’m in a world of hurt./

“What,” Buffy asked in a very low, clipped voice, “the _hell_ was that all about?”

/What to do for now? Play it easy?/ “Ah, nothing much, luv,” he tried, and slipped one leg over the bench to face her. “Just bloke nonsense.”

Her eyes narrowed dangerously.

“Yes,” Giles chipped in unhelpfully from the far side of the broken board. “Something Spike and I needed to get settled between us.”

/Oh, excellent, Rupes./ The sod was clearly trying to get his head taken off for him. /If you wanted revenge, you couldn’t have picked a better way to manage it./

He never took his eyes off of Buffy’s as hers spat fire at him. _“Really.”_ Christ, her tones were withering. “And I’m just supposed to _leave_ it at that? Accept that you needed your manly man-time?”

The thing was, she should know he would never do anything specifically in the vein she was concerned about. She knew, after all, that he wasn't at all the sort.   
  
This wasn’t ‘exclude Buffy because she couldn’t handle it’ or ‘talk about something behind Buffy’s back because we’re men’. Bloody hell; even being what she was, she’d still had to put up with living in a man’s world her whole life and he knew it. It was bullshit. No. This was an entirely other thing, but… She’d misinterpreted. And he needed to find a way to explain it, swiftly, before something broke between them. 

Problem was, how? “Knew you weren’t going to like it, but there were some things we needed to chat about that…” He wasn’t able to say they weren’t about her, per se, though they were only on the face of it. Really, they were more about Rupert, and about him, and… /Oh, hell./ “Couldn’t include you. Things long past needing settling between us…”

“Oh. Things the little woman…”

“Bloody no. Stop that. It’s not like that. It was about us, not about you. Not really.” 

“Oh, _sure.”_ Her voice dripped with sarcasm, laced with an investiture of disgust that impressed even him. She looked him up and down, then Giles, expression absolutely bitter. “Well, at least no one’s bleeding.” And without another word she was up and out, her still half-uneaten breakfast left behind on the table.

/Oh sodding balls./ This was going all fucking wrong.

“Don’t look at me,” Giles murmured cheerfully into his scone, and sipped at his tea like a princess. “I believe you’ve just made this _your_ department.”

Yeah, Watcher was definitely enjoying the denouement. Revenge, or maybe his hopes they’d fall apart right then and there. /Git./ “Oh, sod off, Rupes,” he sighed, and pushed himself wearily to his feet to go after his raging Slayer.

***

He found her on the top of the bloody building, fuming as she leaned over a decorative Victorian battlement. Luckily she’d had the grace, despite her pique, to stay on the westward side of the copper-green, pyramidal central structure, so that he could follow her out without being incinerated. She could just as easily be standing in the new morning sun over there on the northern or southern sides, where he’d have to huddle in the shadows fifteen or twenty feet away and shout at her to make himself heard. But no doubt they’d gotten past that sort of petty nonsense by now. 

She didn’t turn as he approached, arms crossed and staring out over the still-twilit grounds on this side of the building; but her very stance was acknowledgment of his presence. He waited till he was within a foot of her before speaking, low and open. “You wanna talk about it, or just start swinging?”

“Oh, be serious.”

“I am. You sound right brassed off.”

She whirled around to face him, then, clearly incensed. “Alright, I am, but will you stop acting like I’m going to punch you in the face every time I’m mad at you? I thought we were past that! Don’t you trust me?”

He held up his hands. “Alright, alright. Sorry luv. Bad joke.”

“Yeah, this whole thing is a bad joke.” She turned away again, shoulders hunched. “I can’t _believe_ you two. I really can’t.”

She honestly thought they’d cut her out because she couldn’t handle the manly pow-wow. As if he would ever consider her anything less than the top of their little food chain. “You don’t even know what we were talking about,” he pointed out, doing his best not to rise to the occasion. If she could keep her relative cool, so could he, after all.

“I can use my imagination!” she flared, and alright. That bloody cut it. 

No, it didn’t. He had to do some deep breathing, because sometimes that was necessary even to the undead, but he didn’t pop off with something cutting. It was a near thing, but he managed it. And once he’d gotten his temperature back down, as it were… “Alright. You want to know what it was about?”

“Like you’re going to tell me.” 

He stayed placid with an effort. He knew his woman, and she could be a hothead. And so could he. Best to remain room temperature. Defy the stereotypes. “B’lieve I just offered to do it.”

She turned to lean against the wall on her elbows, all glares. “Go ahead. Entertain me with the glorious tale of your manly exploits.” And she waved one hand in a weary half-circle, a whole universe of disdain on her face.

/Stop being a sodding infant, Buffy./ “He needed the chance to throw me up against a wall and threaten me,” he informed her quietly, and hoped that would end the tantrum.

Whatever she had expected, it wasn’t that. _“Excuse_ me?”

“He loves you. He considers himself the father you never had, and he never got to do it before. And since he thinks I’m at best a mild disaster for you, he had to do the ritual. For his own peace of mind; or else he’d feel like he’d failed you again. And he’s failed you enough in his book. If he did it again, he’d go spare. Fall apart, most like; never be able to look you in the eye again.” 

She was clearly completely thrown. “He _threatened_ you?” And now she was starting to get wound up again. “And you _let_ him? After what he did in Sunnydale?” She started toward the stairs. Which Spike had expected, so he caught her by the arm to hold her back. 

“Wait, Buffy.”

“No, are you _kidding_ me?”

“No, I’m not. And I need you to listen.” His low tones caught her attention, riveted her eyes to his. “This is different. And yeah, I let him do it, because it was no skin off mine. He can’t hurt me. Can’t even hurt my feelings, now I know where we are. He can say anything he wants about me; have all the reservations in the world about this relationship. Actually,” he mused as she relaxed a little to stare at him in surprise, “that was a nice experiment for my part. I got to see if I was going to take any of it to heart… or if I really believed we’d changed, with everything in Hell-A. And I guess I do, because it all just slid off of me without leaving a mark.”

Her arm dropped, and she watched him like he was a strange new animal she had never seen before in the light. _“Why_ did he need to threaten you? _How_ did he threaten you?”

Did she really not get it yet? “Oh, you know. The old standard speech. ‘If you ever hurt her I’ll find you and rip your bollocks off and feed 'em to you’, that sort of thing.” When she literally gaped at him he grinned. “It’s all smoke, luv. Blowin’ off steam. Like I said; pure bloke business. You didn’t need to be there, or you’d have mucked it all up and he’d never have gotten it out of his system. And he needed to so he could feel like a proper dad to you again, yeah?” 

She just stared at him, apparently flummoxed. 

“You know he’s been trying to make it up to you since he left, right? But he keeps doin’ it wrong. Sees all the things that went pear-shaped while he was off back in Bath having a kip; Red turnin’ dark-witch, you having the affair with me, Xander and Anya breakin’ it off… And the last bit, the bit that stuck the worst, was me. I just kept hangin’ around like a bad penny. Still am, yeah? So he needs to fix what he can with you.” He turned around to settle against the wall, felt the chill of the stone leach into his dead flesh. Familiar, cold comfort. “Tried to once, and even that turned out to be the wrong bloody call, and made you decide never to trust him again. Not like you did before. And he realized he’d been replaced as head counselor, by a bleedin’ vamp. Realized that it was the worst decision he’d ever made, leavin’. And he hates me for it, because it’s better than hatin’ himself.”

Buffy was watching him now with an expression on her face that might even have been awe as he went on. He wasn’t sure if that was deserved, but he’d take it over rage. “Trouble is, he can’t get me out of the way anymore, because that didn’t bring you back to the fold, so he’s impotent. Stuck just watchin’ us, for better or worse. He just has to pray that loving me won’t destroy you.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and stretched his arms out full length, eyes on her still form. “And watching what you’re evolving into scares the hell out of him, because so far as he can tell, that’s exactly what’s happening.”

She just stood there, watching him for an exceptionally long time, her face unreadable. When she finally spoke, it was in a quiet, thoughtful voice that surprised him with its depth. “You know what, Spike? You’re really super-perceptive about people, aren’t you?”

He grinned at that and pushed away from the wall. “Just now noticing that, are you?”

She crossed her arms and gave him a faint glare, though without any real fire behind it. “I still don’t understand why you’re okay with him threatening you, though, after what he did to you with Robin.”

/And that, my love, is why we know you’re not a bloke. Not that I’m complaining about that fact./ “Simple, Buffy. The thing with Wood was a plain assassination attempt. Not easy to get over that, though I understood what it was about. He was dead scared of the power I had with you. That I had your ear and he didn’t. Made me feel good, actually, in the end, because I hadn’t realized it myself till he put it out there like that. But this…” He shrugged. “It’s a bird of a different bloody feather. This means that, for whatever it’s worth… he accepts this.” And he gestured toward her, and toward himself.

Her face remained as blank as if she’d been faced with quadratic equations. Not that he was any good at those himself. “Accepts…”

Well. He had thought the odd councils of women were labyrinthine and those of men were fairly straightforward, but apparently it was not so. “Accepts _us_ ,” he elaborated. “Accepts what we are. I’m not sayin’ he’s cheerin’ about the fact that he’ll have to invite me over with you for Christmas pudding next hols, but he’s swallowed that it’s done and it’s not goin’ anywhere. And for him… for us? That’s progress, innit?”

Her face twisted into utter disgust. “He threatened you… to show you he accepts that we’re together and he can’t do anything about it?”

Her reaction was priceless. “‘Bout sums it up, yeah.”

“God, all men are Neanderthals. Even suave British guys in tweed. I thought Giles was totally immune.”

He snorted at that. “Must have stirred up his Ripper, then, I reckon. He called me names I wouldn’t have thought it possible for him to say.” He smirked a little over it in memory. “I was right proud of him, actually. Didn’t think his ever-so-proper tongue worked that way.” He tilted his head back a bit. “Makes one wonder what else he might’ve got up to when he was still interesting.”

Buffy’s horrified pique folded into an expression of even greater disgust. “Well, let’s just say I don’t want to hear the word tongue and Giles in the same sentence anymore, since I know for a fact that he slept with Mom.”

That jerked Spike directly out of his quiet amusement. “No! Are you sodding joking? Rupert shagged Joyce?” At her absolutely straight expression he leaned back again, gripping the wall and staring up at the slow-blooming sky. What a revelation. “Well, good on him; and good on her for gettin’ some. Hope he saw to her proper; that lady deserved a bit of fun, lookin’ after the twee Slayer and the Niblet…”

Buffy’s glare tuned up to something a bit more spirited. “Just don’t. Please. I’m not kidding. I don’t even know what a stevedore is, but I know I probably don’t want to know, if Mom used the word in a sentence that also included the words ‘Giles’ and ‘magnificent’ and ‘twice’ and ‘hood of a police car’.”

“Stevedore, is it?” Spike grinned broadly and fought the urge to laugh with hearty abandon. “Well, then, he did see to her properly at that. Good on him.”

“I really, _really_ don’t want to know,” she informed him flatly.

“Don’t use the dictionary then, luv, and you’re safe.” He chuckled. “Thought the only action Rupert had in the last long while was the on-again with the bird from London who flew over and took up with him every so often.”

“The thing with Mom was before that. And I think he had an affair with Miss Calendar before Angelus killed her.” She shrugged a little. “He’s been around.”

“Huh.” Spike pushed away from the wall. “Guess I have to revise my reckoning a bit as pertains to our dear Watcher.” He held out a hand, feeling the prickles of danger worsening on the back of his neck. He really didn’t want to risk staying out here much longer, and she had to be tired by now. Though, he supposed if she wanted to see the sun, she was welcome. “Come to bed, yeah? It’s been the hell of a day. Or do you wanna stay up for a bit?”

She sighed and turned back for a moment to look about her. “No, I’m beat. I’ll enjoy the sunrise tomorrow.” She frowned at him grumpily. “You sure you’re done having threatening conversations? Because I need to make sure they fed Dawn, see where they stashed her, or I’m not gonna be able to sleep…”

Honestly, he might not be able to either. “Yeah, good point.”

It turned out, though, that Dawn’s bit of gallery was a rather nice sort of area, really… and that she was already in it, munching away on a king-sized version of the breakfast Buffy’d had. The former greenhouse was a long sort of room on the south side of the building made up of pillars with panes of glass between; which meant yours truly had, of course, to stay back inside the main dwelling while Buffy poked about to check on the appurtenances. On Andrew’s fussy bidding, two queen-sized mattresses had been laid end-to-end for her on the floor, to create a sort of very long ‘twin’ for her, allowing her to have the room to lie full-length as long as she didn’t roll about too much. As promised there was a sort of cargo-sized outside door leading out to what Dawn assured them was a bog facility already set up for her just round the other side of the wall. She seemed to be settling in well enough with the patchwork of approximately twelve blankets she’d been supplied, and waved them off with a little smile. “I’ll be fine. I’ve got everything I need. It was really good to see Giles and Andrew again. You two go ahead, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

“You’re sure?” Buffy looked anxious, as always, about leaving her bitty sister behind… even though said bitty sister was actually twice her size right now and had recently commenced to stomp half the Scourge army to death with her own two rather large plates. 

“I’m _fine_ , Buffy. Go away. Goodnight, Spike! Or, you know; good day.”

“Sleep well, Platelet.”

They started through the labyrinth, seeking their own temporary quarters and passing little slayerettes flitting through the corridors here and there as they did; all of them, of course, eyeing the visiting vampire askance. Clearly in the interim they’d been given the heads-up about him, though, because no one tried to challenge him to a duel, so that was alright.

Spike recognized not a one of the little blighters, and was glad to find that Buffy seemed to recognize very few of them as well. “Lot of new faces in the lot. Where the hell did the ones I know end up?”

“Here and there. Mostly in the leadership, since they had experience.” She smiled slightly at him, hand on his arm with a patronizing little pat of reassurance. “Lot of recruiting going on.”

“See that. How many are here, do you think?”

“About two hundred,” Andrew’s voice informed them, popping his head round a doorway. “Between Russia, Azores, Barcelona, and Rome, we’re loaded. Girls camping outside, girls filling the rooms… Here. Come, let me show you to your suite, my dear Slayer and, of course, my very dear friend Spike. Despite the crush, we’ve found some ladies willing to double up for the night so that you could have a room…”

Spike stopped dead in the hall. “Mind tellin’ me,” he asked the punctilious little poofter, “why you didn’t let us know the girl in Italy wasn’t Buffy when Angel and I went over there?”

Andrew promptly began dithering. “O…Oh. Uh, see that was… Um…” He quailed and made to turtle back into his doorway, looking a bit puce.

“He had his orders,” Buffy broke in softly. “We didn’t know if we could trust Angel at all, because of the whole Wolfram and Hart thing. Just like before, when he was supposed to bring Dana back, but not tell Angel anything about what we were doing. _No_ one was supposed to know about the decoy spell; so when he saw you there he probably just operated on previous instructions. He knows better than to color outside the lines without orders, so I’d imagine if you seemed to be working so closely with Angel’s people…”

“Yeah. That,” Andrew interrupted, sounding relieved.

“Well.” Spike wasn’t sure what to say to that. He got the security measures, especially if it meant keeping his Slayer safe… but bloody hell. “You could have pulled me aside, yeah? Let me know? And besides…” It hit him all at once, in a rush. “You could have gotten other instructions for me by then anyway. Why the hell didn’t you tell Buffy that I was alive, after the first bloody time?”

Andrew gaped. Stuttered. “I… Because you told me not to?”

But Buffy was already rounding on the poof, her expression becoming a bit scary. Clearly that thought hadn’t occurred to her before now. “Andrew…” she began, and her tone had morphed to something flat out frightening.

The wee blond creature seemed to retreat into his too-large evening jacket. “I just… I didn’t have _time!_ I got back here and reported to Mr. Giles, and then by the time I could’ve made a call, you were _gone_. You took some mission somewhere, and then to another place, then took Dawn to Berkeley, then went to Florence, and half the time no one knew where you were because we weren’t _supposed_ to know…”

It all sounded fine on paper, but it really didn’t hold water and they all knew it. There had been four bloody months between Andrew’s first visit to pick up the rogue Slayer and when he and Angel had gone to Rome. By the time the business with the Circle had gone tits up and Buffy had shown up in LA there should have been plenty of time for the lad to have made a swift phone call in there somewhere. Tracked her down from their network. Told someone else he had something urgent to tell her and rung her up. _Something_.

“You made your report to Giles,” Buffy repeated, clearly smelling some sort of rat. “Did you tell _him_ about Spike?”

Andrew went very still. “Um…”

“Bloody fuck,” Spike whispered. The rat had worn tweed.

Buffy turned around and started back down the corridor, voice tense and low and fists clenched. “I’ll kill him.”

He thought he might let her. “He told you not to tell her, that right?”

Buffy turned back, on the verge of violence but obviously wanting to hear what Andrew had to say.

“He, um, kinda said that she was busy and needed to focus on recruiting the slayerettes and training the new girls, and that Angel was right about your mission, and your new destiny, and that you were right about seeking your glorious new heroic fate, and that it was kismet that you were in LA, and that going to find you and taking care of you when you were all… injured would be a distraction for Buffy…”

“Injured?” Buffy demanded, swinging on Spike.

Spike waved it off, glaring intensely at the lad to insist he continue his faltering justification.

“…And that maybe with some time away,” Andrew dithered, “she’d get some perspective and realize that she needed to focus on herself, and growing, and…”

Buffy had that light in her eye. The one that said she was on the razor’s edge of homicidal. Not that the blamed her. When he thought…

Not that he’d give over their time in Hell-A for any money. What it had done for them, as a couple… But still. Fucking Giles. Had he been working with Angel directly, or on his own bloody recognizance? Filling Andrew’s head with nonsense, and working over every bit of fluff the boy had in it; a fatal triumvirate of roadblocks, put together with Spike’s own utter lack of self-worth and dithering. 

Spike had thought Rupert wouldn’t have wanted to hurt the Slayer ever again. Damn the man; to find out now that the prat had gone on doing so even after everything had gone down in Sunnyhell was a bitter pill. Not that he, Spike, was at all innocent in those charges, but he hadn’t done it out of any high-handedness. He had been newly-resurrected and utterly fucked in the head about his own decision-making, his own life’s goals, his own meaning within the warp and weft of the reality he had so recently vacated. 

Giles had sodding well made the decision for Buffy simply because he had thought he had known better for her what suited her life, when he hadn’t been at all involved. It was an entirely other matter indeed. 

Christ; what if Buffy had never run into the Scourge? If they had never located any of the Slayer cells by it? What if she had never found out about him till months later, what with everything? Would their lives have diverged so bloody much that they would have never figured things out? Too much time might have passed for them, and their chance might have gone. She might’ve decided it was all too much a risk to take, and wrecked by going through all that nonsense in Hell-A alone he might have gone on letting sleeping dogs lie, might have decided she was just confirming he was right to stay away. And all her certitude that men were meant to leave her would just have been confirmed in turn by his remaining far from her, and… “Christ, Andrew, did you at least even think of flouting orders to let her know? You know she’d want to hear it!”

“That’s what I want to know! I mean, I can’t _believe_ this! You worked with me in my cell in Italy! I thought I could _trust_ you!” 

Betrayals were just abounding today.

Andrew stuttered, looking utterly stricken at his failure. “I tried to call once. But he caught me and reminded me that… he knew you better. Knew what was best for you. That I was a newcomer and… I should listen to him and do what he said, or I’d mess up your life. That you deserved the chance to… move on...” 

Spike growled so loudly that the little bastard quailed away midsentence, but it was tough not to snarl, remembering those self-assured pronouncements in Rome. _“The point is she's moving on. You guys do the same, and you might catch her one day. One of you, anyway. But you keep running in place, you're gonna find she's long gone. Buffy loves both of you, but she's gotta live her life.”_

To think he’d been merely parroting another’s words, that Rupert was to blame for that little heartbreaker of a fucking speech was…

Christ.

Andrew’s eyes darted from his to Buffy’s, looking like a squirrel trapped between two very large, very irate hawks. “So I… put down the phone. And then the next time I tried, you were in Florence, and then you were just… MIA, and I didn’t... I wasn’t sure if I was wrong to even get in the middle of it, or…”

Bloody, bloody hell. Spike knew Rupert was foursquare against their being an item, but this took the sodding cake. “Buffy…”

“We should leave.”

He caught her arm. “We still need his help to get Dawn back right-sized.”

“We’ll find another way. Willow will be back in Scotland soon. Maybe she can do it. We’re _leaving_.”

He knew that uncompromising tone. And he knew that it all came of hurt, and of anger. That she wasn’t thinking clearly. “I’m right behind you, Love, but we’re both knackered, and so is the Niblet. We’ve been through a sodding war, traveled across Europe, sat up all morning having a fight with a man you called father, and now we’re finding out even more that’s got to have you wrecked, emotionally. You need sleep, and so does Dawn, before we blow out of here. So, we’ll go. After we rest.” /And, you know, the sun goes beneath the bleedin’ horizon…/

“Like I can sleep here, knowing that he…”

He turned her bodily. Caught her face in his healed and salvaged hands. “And did it work? We’re still here. All it did was buy us a one-way-ticket to hell. And that, perversely enough, was our heaven, yeah? So you could even say he did us a favor, in the end.”

All her ire drained away, leaving behind nothing more than exhausted frustration. “Why do you have to be so stupidly logical?” she whispered. “You used to be one-hundred percent behind me when I wanted to just go out and whack off heads.”

“Yeah, well… what can I say. Got wee Willie in the driver’s seat right now." /Damn holdover from being all soddin' considered and bloodless earlier./ "I’ll put the demon out front tomorrow for you," he promised, "while we have this next one out with Rupes.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” Whirling around again, she pinned Andrew with a fierce stare. “Where are we staying?”

The lad jittered like he had Tourette’s, but he led the way. “Here. Uh, I got you the best room that was left. It’s set up real nice. And there’s a fireplace, if you…”

“Ta for that,” Spike grumbled; more for the reported attempts to get information to Buffy despite orders than for the latter bit. Dead dangerous, fires.

As if the reminder had kick-started something in her, Buffy turned back to their former enemy-cum-ally. “Yes. Thank you, Andrew. I really appreciate… that you tried.”

“I guess I should’ve tried harder, huh?”

Her eyes flicked to Spike’s and she sighed heavily. “You didn’t know what would happen.”

“I guess. Well…” He flapped his hands around, looking at a loss. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.” She turned back toward the interior of the room, and Spike made to close the door.

“Um…” Of course, the little poof was still hovering.

/Fucksake./ “Yeah?”

“I’m really glad… to have you back, Spike. I mean, here, but also… back. It kinda… gives me hope. For me.” With a little smile, he was backing away, down the hall.

“Huh.” Grunting in dismissal, Spike swung the heavy oaken door closed and turned to survey their accommodations. 

Nice enough to be going on with, he supposed. Heavily-furnished with a mixture of old, clunky sorts of dark, wooden furniture and the occasional newer and more functional item dating from the Cold War years—a lovely old walnut armoire here, a square, dark gray nightstand there, that sort of thing—it was bound on one side with a functional, unleavened, and stained old fireplace, and at the other with heavy, scarlet draperies. Which were, at the moment, partly-open on the morning, around a window facing the bloody east so that it sent a goddamned bolt of sun across the floor to make everything in the chamber sharp-edged and shocking. 

The damn rays trapped him just inside the door, slicing into his eyes like knives of fire, and Buffy hustled immediately further within, cursing as she worked off some of her irritation in the closing of the thick draperies so that he could safely edge further into the room. Once the place was sunken into a comfortable gloom he moved deeper into the chamber, assessing the decent-sized bed—a low, oaken four-poster, the bedstead coming up about hip-high and covered in scarlet clothes to match the curtains—and the rather lovely carvings in the oaken board atop the marble mantle of the unlit fireplace. “It’s one of the nicer rooms, no doubt,” he hazarded after a moment. “No doubt they probably fit three or four of the chits in here.”

He turned his head from his perusal… and saw Buffy standing in the center of the space, hugging herself and seeing nothing. /Oh, bloody hell./ 

Striding swiftly near, he pulled her close into his body. Laid a hand to her head. Her misery was obvious. “I’m sorry, Love.”

She just shook her head against his collarbones, clearly overwhelmed for the moment. 

Well, fuck. “C’mon, pet. Just let’s have a lie-down. Not think, for a bit.” He tugged her toward the bed and prayed that closeness and exhaustion might do for her; at least for now. That she might just fall asleep, let it be till she woke and had more faculties to cope with what had just happened.

He could face yet another evidence of Giles’ betrayal with fortitude. The git hadn’t betrayed _him_. As well, for him it was to be expected. 

But for Buffy… It had to be beyond devastating.

As they landed on the bed he pulled her close. She allowed it; permitted him to cuddle her into his body, curve himself around her. She was lost in herself right now. /Oh, Love, Love…/

She merely clung, for a good long while. He let her, and held her; stroked her back and her hair, and waited. 

"If he knew..." she whispered after some indeterminate time, "why would he accuse me of trying to resurrect you?" Hurt bewilderment made her plaintive; made her voice sound far too young. 

A fair question, that, especially considering her own history with being dragged from the afterlife; and doubly cruel now, knowing the old ponce had known already that he had not needed the treatment. Unless...

"Who knows how much he knew about how I got back. And he dared not ask you if you knew, yeah? And I was a ghost for a bit. No one knew for a bloody long time how it was I got made corporeal again, as well. I just opened a parcel, and flash-bang; there I was again, able to feel everything. Big soddin' mystery." Spike shook his head grimly. "And then you show up on his front porch with me? So I suppose for all he knew, you sent a spell, or hired someone to do it, after finding out I was trapped in the amulet or what-have-you, and then found out later from Andrew that it worked and came to fetch me."

Buffy shook her head against him, clutched him deeper to her; and he knew she wished that it had been like that. Anything for more time. 

Instead, there had been betrayal, and time lost. And now... this. “Spike, how come he always does this? How come this always happens? I thought… I thought he’d never let me down, and now… it’s like it’s all he _does._ ”

Rubbing her chilled arms, Spike shifted a little closer to her and wished he could warm her. But it was a chill of the soul, not the body, and there was little he could do about either, right now. “Maybe it’s too much to ask someone to never disappoint you.” Peaches had let her down too, and she was withering in her disenchantment with that git as well. Not that he minded in that case, but he knew every one of them caused her pain. 

God knows he’d let her down as well. And yet, he had to pray that he was different. That that was why he had the grace he was given, to be here with her now. Because the others had been put on pedestals, had had further to fall. /Buffy and I… We’re real, though./ It was their one saving grace. He’d started from zero with her, and vice-versa. She knew his worst, knew his best, knew everything in between. And maybe he’d put her on a pedestal in the middle of things somewhere; but not in the way that others had. Her pedestal was made up of asking her to be nothing more than exactly what he knew she could be, if she could just but allow herself to be what she might come to be; like a butterfly trapped in its cocoon, and only he could see through the chrysalis to see the shifting patterns of what she might become. And so, yeah. Maybe it had been a bit of a letdown for a long bloody time when she had refused her building metamorphosis. 

Except… even that struggle had just made her more human for him. Made her more courageous, the way she always picked herself up. Made him love her _more_. Because he had seen her best and her worst, just as she’d seen his… and she was incredible. And… for some reason, she had seen what he could be, and had believed in him, as well. /That’s why we’re gonna get through all this/ he told himself fiercely. /That’s why we’re gonna work. And why I can understand… why./ “You wanted him to be there. But you wanted him to do it in a way that honors you, and he… He’s tried to do it in another way, Buffy. Tried to force you into a cocoon again. One he sees as protecting you. To him, he’s doing what’s right for you. He doesn’t see that he’ll be crushing your wings to do it." His hand never ceased running down her hair; endless, soothing strokes. "That you’re not meant to stay on the ground anymore. Because the girl he knew was trapped there; where he could keep her safe. And if you fly away… he can’t.”

She turned her head, back and forth against his collarbone. “He’s afraid I’m turning into something he doesn’t recognize, isn’t he?”

No use prevaricating. “Yeah.”

“He’s afraid it’s wrong. What I’m becoming.”

/Therein lies the rub./ “It’s beyond his ken, luv. He doesn’t know it, so it must be dangerous.” 

“And he blames you.”

That one was easy, and he cupped her head for a moment in emphasis. “Easier than blaming you, pet. Or himself, or the Council that made him—and you—for all he doesn’t much like the buggers either." He resumed his stroking. "Because in his head there’s still a line. And on one side’s the good guys and the other’s the bad guys. And for better or worse, whatever their means, that lot was on the good side, and I’m not. Not so long as I’m pulling you away from what you were bred in the bone to do.”

She tautened against him, but her voice carried a slight, pained tremor. “Why can’t he see that there’s no good guys or bad guys, Spike?” she whispered. “That there’re just _people_ , and we just have to make it up as we go, every minute?”

She’d come so bleedin’ far. “That’s what I’ve always loved about the way you go at it, Buffy. Sod the bloody book. You just do what’s needful, in the moment. You don’t decide till you get there; don’t spend an hour beforehand worryin’ about what might go wrong, how to do it right when you don’t know what you’re gonna face or how it’s meant to pan out. You just go balls-out and do the work and adapt, and accept the risk that there might be something in that you’ll have to deal with after, if it all goes to pot. No bloody wonder you’ve come out the other side able to adjust. You’ve never been their damned robot, and now…” His arms tightened about her, bringing her, if possible, even closer to him. “You might be the one thing that makes all this make sense, someday.”

She went still against him. Shivered. “I don’t feel like anything makes sense right now, Spike. Nothing except… this. Can you just… hold me?”

/Oh, bloody hell. Fuck you, Rupert, and the sodding horse you rode in on./ “Always, Love. Forever and always.” Tucking the blanket around her to warm her in a way he could not, he curled himself around her body and held her tight against the clamoring exigencies that pulled at her from either side of a line in the sand drawn in a cave ten thousand years ago.

Could love be enough to scuff out parts of that line, and make her safe from it?

Could _his_ broken, imperfect love be enough?

***  
  
  
  
  
  
  
...yeah.  
  
It'll be a long road. But like a few other authors, I simply cannot see it any other way but that Giles knew.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Crap, and now another week has gone by. Man, I need catch-up time! Jeez. 
> 
> Alright. Throwdown with Giles, the beginnings of the turnaround with him, which will continue in later parts of the saga... and we pick up again with the Dawnster, and the mental mess the comics threw all over her like some sort of sex-shaming vomit, all-in-the-family style, so that we can begin to finally unravel that tangle of nonsense.
> 
> Oh, also some stuff about Willow that Buffy hasn't considered as yet, to prep future reconciliation there (though that too is on hold for a bit).
> 
> off we go, then.

**B:**

Buffy clawed with broken fingernails and cracked bones through the suffocating dirt. Gasped, and inhaled soil. Choked and could not but scream more; tried with everything she had not to scream because it meant breathing not air but dirt and it was filling her lungs, filling her with heavy dust and motes of soil like death and her strength was giving out, she had to dig and her lungs were burning and aching and her brain was fading and it never ended, it was never going to end, she was going to die, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t…

“Love, love, I’m here, you’re back, you’re out! Come on back, Buffy, Love, it’s over! Long over pet, shh, come on then. Feel me here, you’re not there anymore, come on back…”

She gasped into the awareness of cool, free air. Scrabbled against something cool and yielding, nails bared, heart pounding in terror as she shuddered into to the now against the solid reality of Spike’s chest. She was panting and sobbing, knew tears were streaming down her cheeks, knew they were wetting his shirt. Knew he wouldn’t care; that he would hold her tight in strong, banding arms and keep her here and alive until she got herself back under control… and that was everything.

God, it had been forever since she’d had that horrible dream. Not since…

His voice rumbled through her; a lifeline, a physical presence as he went on speaking to her. Stroked her hair, her back and murmured little things, gentle things. How he _knew_ , but it was over. How it was terrifying, but it was past. Please know he would always be here. That he would never let it happen again. “Never let anyone put you in the ground again, Buffy; I swear to Christ I will _end_ anyone who tries…” It was said with a fervent promise that rang through her like striking a low-toned bell of sincerity. It was impossible to remain tense when that voice stroked everything in her with the programming of calm, of peace. Like a cat’s purr, almost. 

A really big one. Maybe a leopard or something.

When he felt her slowly begin to relax, his tones changed a little, though his caresses never faltered. “Does it still come back on you a lot, Love? I haven’t… seen it.”

She heard the question there. Had she been having the nightmares, but hiding them from him? Or had something about being here, about Giles’ new betrayal, brought them on again? 

She shook her head against his chest. “I haven’t since… you,” she whispered. “You keep them away. But while you were gone…”

His arms tightened again, dragging her close. “Bloody fuck, pet…” She knew that tone. The self-mortifying one. He was mad at himself again, that he hadn’t been there to hold her through that year. She hastened to reassure him, since mostly that dream had been superseded by another, last year. This one… had mostly been the year before that, and the year before that; in the times when she hadn’t let him hold her, hadn’t let herself sleep with him. Had sex with him, yes, but the comfort of a lover’s touch in her bed, no. And after, when she had _wanted_ him with her in her lonely bed… she had been terrified to cross that line from top floor to basement and ask.

So insane to think that of all the times they’d been in ‘bed’ together, the first time they’d held each other had been without sex… and not counting when she’d been invisible, the only time there’d even been a bed involved, before hell, had been after they’d stopped. /God, I was stupid. I could’ve had this. Could’ve had you, and the nightmares gone. What was I _thinking?_ /

The thing was, though, this nightmare was old. Another had long since taken its place. “While you were gone, I mostly dreamed of fire.” It came out soft and low, but he would read the desolation there.

The short, staggered silence was broken with a breathless, “Buggering Christ. Buffy…”

She quietened him with a tightening of her hand over his undead heart. “When you… woke up, the first time… What was it like? To not feel your heart? To not feel your pulse when you clenched your fists?” /And fought your way out./ It choked in her. “To not have to breathe, when you…” 

His breath shuddered, understanding. “Bloody hell.” Clearly it hadn’t occurred to him what it must have been like to need to find air while… But just as clearly, he understood that she didn’t want to talk about it. Wanted to hear how it had been for him. Sharing as a kind of therapy. And he would do that for her, she knew. The experience was, after all, much further removed, for him. “Yeah, it was strange. At first I panicked, thinkin’ I needed to breathe. Still don’t much like it, not havin’ the option; but that goes back to other things. Older things…”

Interesting, and something she would pursue later. But not now. Spike was the most bizarre vamp, with his insistence on breathing when he didn’t need to. But she simply did not have the headspace at the moment to follow that line of questioning. So she curled her fingers into his chest and waited, hanging onto the moment with him; the moment of escape. /If I can get out with him, then maybe we can both be free./ 

He felt her desperation, of course, there in the dim room, laid his cheek against the top of her head in comfort, his whole body around her to show her that, cool but acclimated to hers, she wasn’t frozen beneath six feet of soil, and she wasn’t alone. “But I wasn’t noticing all that much, innit? I was roaring with life of another kind, starving and filled with more purpose than I’d ever known in my whole puerile existence before then. I just tore right out and felt like a god for it.” He caught her hand then, turned it over in the dark. And she realized eventually that he was inspecting the knuckles, where faint scars were still visible in the light; or, perhaps, in the dark, to catlike vampire eyes. “Easier, I guess, when you’re not disoriented, terrified, and you don’t need the air.”

The shudder wrenched at her. She pulled her mind away. “Yeah.”

“Wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy,” he murmured, thumb caressing her knuckles now, and sighed heavily. “Sure the fuck wouldn’t have wished it on you.” And a low thread of old rage had resurfaced in his voice for Willow. For the spell.

“It brought me back,” she whispered into his throat. “Gave me to you, and you to me. It was hard, but…”

His hand clenched on hers for a moment, then released, and the wrath dissipated. “S’pose she paid enough. She lost her bird over it. Magick always has bleedin’ consequences. Tried to tell them. Stupid infants, all. Reckon there’s nothing worse I could ever do to her over it that’d be a greater wrench than her livin’ on, knowin’ the only way she’d ever get Glinda back is to do the same to her; and that she’d never do, knowin’ what it did to you.”

Buffy pulled away to try to look at him, though most of his features were lost in semi-darkness. “What does Tara dying have to do with the spell? That was like _months_ later.”

He pulled back as well to eye her in surprise. “She must not have paid the cost, yeah? Or not paid enough. Elsewise the bird would still be with us, dancing on the flowers. She was the best of us, yeah? The Powers Red called on to bring you back weren’t satisfied to lose someone as tasty as you without gettin’ something back as pure and full of light an’ all. So they took their exchange the way a bloke who feels cheated at poker comes into the shop with a gun and takes it from the register, all violent-like.” He shrugged. “Knew it the minute I came back and heard. Saw Red, broken. Saw you, strong again. Not fallin’ apart anymore.” Buffy blinked, startled. And stared at him in the twilight as his hand rose, brushed the hair off her face. “It’s always blood, Buffy,” he whispered. “That kind of magick, that kind of connection. The circle that binds life and death and life again. It’s always paid in blood.” And he winced; enough that she felt it even in the dark. “A sodding lot of it, to get you back.”

/ _God_./ The thought that Tara had died because of her… That that warm, quietly strong, amazing person could be put beyond all their reach because _she_ had been brought back so unnecessarily was anathema. Buffy didn’t want to believe it, but it all made sense, and guilt for having been the reason for that exchange slipped from the scales; a crushing weight.

“Don’t.” The quiet rumble was a gentle reprimand. “It wasn’t you did it, luv. It was Red. You ask why she’s always gone? Why she’s always tryin’ to find herself, why she barely talks to anyone, why she’s inaccessible as a ghost? It’s because lookin’ at you brings it back. The guilt.”

/Oh God…/

“Forces her to know it; that she’s the reason she lost the bird, and her alone. Not that pillock with the gun, else flayin’ the monster would’ve given her some peace. Else she wouldn’t have turned into her woman’s sodding killer whenever she thought she might take a moment to be happy again. She feels she doesn’t deserve it. More’n that; she feels she’s the one, ultimately, did her in. That it’s on her hands. That’s why she wanted to destroy the world; end it all. Because she’s the reason she already lost the only thing matters to her, and she can never have it back. She can’t face it.”

Willow’s voice, a monotone death-knell in her head. _“The only thing I had going for me... were the moments—just moments—when Tara would look at me, and I was wonderful. And that will never happen again.”_

/Oh, God… Willow./ 

“You didn’t choose this, Buffy. This isn’t on you. If I catch you carryin’ it I’ll strangle you.”

Buffy’s fingers tightened in the cotton of Spike’s black tee, lost in the darkness. She understood now; Willow’s tentative voice on the phone. " _When are you leaving?"_ Understood, for the first time, why losing Tara had somehow lost them Wil—a core member of the group—as if Tara, and not Willow, had been the one binding that duo to the whole. Understood why Willow didn’t want to be where she, Buffy, was. It was like when she had first come back, and it had nearly killed her to look at the friend who had torn her out of heaven. 

It was weird, the way things were now; like without Tara, Willow almost didn’t even fit into the group anymore. But then, Buffy got that. In the last year, without Spike, she had kind of emotionally removed herself from the group too. 

Really the Scoobies had pretty much fallen apart. Xander, the heart, was really all that was left; just clinging to the remains, holding the center for them all. Holding it together for all of them, in the hopes it would re-form someday… because it was all he had.But what if… /What if we’re just… growing up? Going our separate ways, finally?/ 

Somehow she couldn’t see things ever being the same again, their little handmade family. And it hurt, remembering the promises she and Wil had once made to each other. To be little old ladies together somewhere, living side-by-side as Slayer-and-witch roomies or something. The dynamic duo, till the end of time, without taking into account the fact that they would both want partners, and had widely diverging interests, and… /Life happens. Life always comes crashing in. And the things you think are certain and will never change… do. All that you take for granted, all that you think is a part of who you are kind of falls in, and you have to rebuild your entire picture of what and who you are. What the future is going to be./

She felt her fingers fold into Spike’s shirt, aware she wouldn’t trade any of it for this. Not for a second. Though… if there was any way to have Tara back without it hurting her, she’d take it. /But there isn’t, so…/

So the leftover Scoobies would have to figure out their shit, alone, or in groups of two, she supposed. Luckily right now she was at least out of the way enough for Wil to get back together with Xan for a while so he wouldn’t be holding the fort alone. Even if she and Dawn had been with him in body, he’d kind of been alone for too long. He needed his oldest friend; needed Willow. 

/Later, maybe, Wil and I will get a chance to sort things out./ “I need to get her to talk to me. Help her, somehow.”

Spike sounded dubious. “Not sure there’s any help for her, pet.”

It hurt to think about. She remembered what it was like to be there. And she had at least had Spike. What if Kennedy wasn’t enough? Though, at least now she understood now why Wil was clinging to the girl so hard. She didn’t get Wil and Kennedy, but whatever. No one had gotten her and Spike either, so who was she to talk? 

Still, that only made it all the more important. To mend the fences. Make the effort. “She’s always been there for me.”

A pause, and then she was answered by a heavy sigh. “After we settle the Niblet, we can head back, if you want.”

_‘When are you leaving?’_

Buffy shook her head. “Not… right away. Xander needs her to stay. So, we’ll stay away and… give her time to adjust, first.” /Better not to be selfish./

He relaxed palpably. He really didn’t want to go back. Wanted badly to keep moving forward. Not that she blamed him. 

Neither did she. 

Forward, out of the past. Out of the graves and the choking, airless dark, and away from the burning of fire and sun. Into the future; into the quiet twilight where they always met in the middle. 

Buffy burrowed back into his chest. Pulled him close. And let herself, for the moment, rest.

***

She burst into Giles’ study the minute she woke up. He had his head down over a book, of course, and looked up with mild alarm at her entrance. The tangerine light of sunset glanced off of his careworn face—one she had loved so desperately since she was sixteen—throwing the mask into high relief. “Ah, Buffy. I’m hot on the trail of this, er, de-gianting, though I am somewhat at a loss, since a thricewise isn't supposed to have that much power at all…”

“You _knew!_ You _knew_ he was alive and you didn’t tell me!”

He went very still. Pulled off his glasses. And didn’t polish them. Just set them aside on the desk and pushed to his feet. Shoved his hands in his pockets. And the mask slid away to reveal, at least, actual deep regret. “I made a mistake.”

It wasn’t enough. Not even close. She was so beyond hurt that she could barely speak. “No. You don’t get to get out of this one. Put your glasses back on and _look_ at me.”

Obviously he didn’t want to see the pain he’d inscribed all over her; in every line of her body, her features. The glasses stayed off, guilt written over every line of his body. “Buffy, I assure you…”

“Put them back on.” No way he was going to avoid seeing how he’d hurt her with this.

With a sigh, he fumbled for the ever-present spectacles, slid them back onto his nose. Clipped them carefully over his ears… and faced her down calmly. The calm, though, was belied by the fact that his hands were shaking. “I thought…”

“No,” she told him flatly. “You didn’t. You _decided_. You decided _for_ me. I’m changing, and you wanted to keep me the same.” He flinched. “Giles, dammit; you left so that I could make my own decisions… but then you came back and decided you didn’t like what they were, and you were going to change them for me. Show me the error of my ways.” Her words were like blows, making him wince with every point. She wielded them with the strength of a dozen flurries in the training room, didn’t hold back as she might once have done in another time and place. “But _you_ were the one who decided to leave, Giles, _not_ me. I _begged_ you to stay, and you left anyway. You decided I didn’t need any more parents or guides. That I was good to go on my own. That you were done making my decisions for me, or even guiding me. That you’d done your part and it was time you retired.” She stalked forward, slapped her hands down hard on his desk and lowered her voice to something deadly. “You need to live with that decision. Because I’ve had to. And I’m _glad_.” 

His voice, when he spoke, sounded rough; almost choked. “You told me… you thought I was wrong to go. Before you told me I was right, you said…”

/Oh, really? _Now_ you’re questioning this? Because of _Spike?_ It’s a little _late!_ / “Yeah. I did. And I still do. You left me to drown. And you know what? Spike caught my hand. More than that; he jumped in with me; kept me afloat when I had _no one_. And maybe that’s the way it needs to be, because I can’t depend on you forever. You were right about that. It’s time I moved on from parents. Found my way as an adult. So yeah. Maybe you were right, in the end. I don’t know. But the fact is, one way or the other, you _left_ …”

“I don’t believe I _was_ right, Buffy.” His expression was flat, and she saw the judgment there. “When I look at what it’s done to your life…”

/Just stop./ “You wanted me to grow up, Giles. I did. Maybe too fast, like I’ve always had to… but I did. It’s done. I wasn’t happy about it then, but…” She could feel Spike, behind her, just on the other side of the door. Not interfering, because this was her fight, yet as always standing close by, in case he was needed. “But I am now. And you’re going to back off. Forever. This is _mine_. You are never going to take it from me. I’ve fought for it, bled for it, cried for it, sacrificed for it. I will fight for it again; against you. Against anyone or anything. Don’t try to take Spike away from me, because I _will_ choose him. I would have thought you’d have already learned that lesson last year.”

His silence was a very clear indicator that he had heard her loud and clear, even then. He just hadn’t wanted to listen. “I thought… I just didn’t want to see you hurt again, Buffy,” he defended. His lined face twisted in pain, seemed to age even more in a second. “It hurt you so badly to leave him behind. To realize that pain was unnecessary for you, because that _he_ didn’t think to tell you…”

Buffy was abruptly filled with so many conflicting emotions that she thought she might actually explode. They all burst out of her mouth at once, the foremost a sort of strangled amazement that anyone could think they might possibly know better than she what Spike had been going through. That she would blame _him_ , after… _“He_ gets a pass. If _anyone_ knows how much it can mess up your head to be resurrected against your will, it’s _me_ , dammit!” 

Giles actually recoiled visibly at that, and looked abruptly anguished. Buffy gave him no opportunity to backpedal. “But _you_. You and Angel and everyone else who did it _‘for_ me’, because they ‘wanted what was best for me’… How _dare_ you?”

Giles’ voice was shaking now; and, Buffy thought, his hands as well. “Buffy, I just want you to be safe and…”

If he said ‘happy’ she would actually hit him. He had no idea anymore what made her happy. “No. Just _stop_. What I need from you is to tell us how to fix Dawn, and then we’re leaving. And you’re _never_ going to interfere with my relationship with Spike. Ever. Again.”

Giles looked suddenly very old as his eyes jerked away. As he was relegated from father to scholar. To tool. And in the one corner of her heart where she still had room for him, it hurt to do it. But… it was his own damn fault. “Well,” he managed quietly, “the thing of it is… I can look in every book I have, but I don’t know that I’ll get any other answer but the one I’ve found thus far.”

“Which is?”

“No one can break a thricewise’s curse but the thricewise who cast it.”

Today was turning out to be extremely disappointing. “So, they’re like vengeance demons?”

“Er… in a manner of speaking, I suppose…”

“Fine. Then I guess we head off to Berkeley. Corner Kenny and demand him to take the thing off. God knows how we’ll get Dawn there. It’ll probably take a while. Maybe sometime on the way there we can convince her to finally tell one of us why the hell the jerk cursed her…”

“I can help you find a suitable conveyance…”

She whirled on him. “We’ll be fine. We’ll leave tonight, figure the rest out once we drop the bus off in Rome...”

The pained lines in his face deepened. “Buffy…”

“No. I’m serious, Giles. I’m done. We’re leaving.” 

She could feel Spike over there, outside the room, ready to stalk off with her, get something going. He was with her, one hundred percent. Whatever she wanted, whatever she needed, Spike would do. As always.

But Giles was on his feet again, hand held out pleadingly. “I’m so sorry, Buffy. Please. I never wanted…”

He looked so broken. But he would never understand. And damn her, she still wanted him to. The tiny, remaining shred of her that wanted him to be her father, wanted him to love her—as she _was—_ begged her to try just one more time. 

The fact that part of him still wanted to try was what forced the words out, in spite of her anger, her pain, the ferocious sense of betrayal that gnawed and bit and made her want to lash out with all that she had. “Giles, what’s your _problem_ with Spike? After everything he’s done?”  
  
The bareboned question earned her a pained expression. And Giles turned slightly, as if seeking something he was missing. Moved, very slowly, looking old, to take his seat. “Because I've… I’ve been there Buffy, and it never ends well.”

/Just… what?/ “You've been _where_ , Giles?”

The glasses came off again. “You must think I’m blind,” he murmured, “but I assure you I’m not. I understand quite well. The sharp good looks, the ridiculous charisma, the bad-boy image. The decadence, the ability to draw one in with the seduction of the dark side, the _allure_ of it all; even the bloody duster. And then all the sudden you can't get out; and it's an _addiction,_ Buffy. Believe me, I know; but you…” He drew in a deep, shaking breath. “I’m quite terrified for you, do you understand that? Everything in me screams that I must tell you to get out while you still can, before it eats your soul.”

Buffy stared at him, utterly at a loss. What the hell was he even talking about. Or… who? “Giles, who are you…”

He waved a hand abruptly, pushing it aside. “It doesn’t matter. You’re perhaps right. I might be… projecting. You’re perfectly within your rights, as an adult, to make your own decisions, and I was very wrong indeed to have… interfered in the way I did without making you aware of the information I’d gleaned. In the very least, Spike was a member of your team, and you’d deserved to know…”

“You’re damn right I did.” She shook it off, because right now she didn’t even want to know, much less care, what the hell that little weird side-trip had been about. Something else had occurred to her; a firm realization. “You think I’m just with him out of guilt or something. Or familiarity. Or because he makes sense to me right now, in some twisted way.” The words came out clipped, the agony stunted by self-protective armor. “Or because he’s convinced me that I need him, out of some selfish motivation or something. That’s it, right?”

He didn’t need to answer. And it drove her crazy to see it. Drove her crazy that he couldn’t see _her_. It all burst out then, because dammit, why couldn’t he? Why couldn’t he _see_ it? “God! Giles, I’m _happy_. I’m having all these emotions I couldn’t even _feel_ before, because they weren’t safe for me to have them. They’re exploding out of me. I don’t even know what to do with them half the time. I think… this is what it’s like to be _human._ ” 

Giles was clearly floored. He sank back in his seat, pale and stunned. She pushed on before he could recover. “And I know you can’t believe it, because obviously I seemed miserable before, with him; but that wasn’t _about_ him. It was about everything else; because the only time I even felt _alive_ was with him.” Another flinch, this one much more pained. No reason to let him off the hook. “Now, though… Don’t you understand, do you hear what I’m _telling_ you? You said you were fine with it the first time around—with Angel—because he made me happy, and you knew how short supply that was in my life; and because deep inside you knew I’d never have it with some normal guy. Okay; great. That part hasn’t changed. And I know Angelus screwed that up for you… but Spike’s not Angel _or_ Angelus, and I. _Am_. _Happy_.” 

His expression started to close up at even the mention of Angelus, and, just no. “Don’t you see?” she half-whispered. “I never thought I’d get to be something so simple. That I’d get to be happy. Scrape out a little contentment in between battles, maybe, if I sold my soul for it. Paid for it in blood. Someone else’s, or mine.” He winced hardcore at that; cracked back open like an egg. /You get it now, finally? Maybe?/ “But happy? I’m _so_ happy, Giles. I laugh, I cry, I’m really _living_. Can’t you see that I never thought I’d get to _have_ that?”

The silence between them dragged on for a long, painful minute. When Giles finally responded, it was with a heavy, wounded reluctance that had him spreading his fingers across his books in a slow, precise movement, to situate them in the exact center of his desk. “And he gives you that.”

“And so much more.” It was a quiet but insistent battle cry.

She was a little shocked… and deeply grateful, when his eyes closed. And opened wet. When he answered, his voice shaken. “Then I’m glad, Buffy.”

On the other side of the door, from where Spike waited, the umbilicus between them built of blood and love swelled and crested with a kind of crystalline joy and gratitude, and… pride.

It wasn’t everything, but it was enough for now. Maybe it would even, someday, put things right between Giles and herself. 

At the least, it might buy a little grace for Giles to watch, and know, that she was telling the truth. That she was happy, and in love, and that she was going to be okay. After all, that was what he did. Watched. He just had to be open-minded enough to actually _see_. “Here.” She slapped down the sheaf of papers she held, so that they made a low _thwapping_ noise on his desk. “This is the new manual. We wrote it up on the way over.” Yes, she still had a little bit of an edge to her voice. Fine. “I’ve mailed a copy to Xander and Robin already. I copied one for Andrew. He already has it.” She wasn’t going to count on Giles to pass it on, in case he totally disagreed with her conclusions. “I think I’ve pretty much used up all your toner. Sorry about that. You can decide to teach it to your girls or not, but if you actually want to benefit from my experience, I have some ideas about how to cut down the casualties on both sides and maybe live in something closer to peace with the demon world. It might be worth a shot.” She started to turn away. “Call it my legacy.”

“Buffy, I assure you, I’ll most definitely look at any observations you’ve gleaned, and the theories you’ve divined from them.” His voice was trembling a slightly. It sounded fervent, if weak. “You’ve by far earned that courtesy from me, and you’re certainly intelligent enough to be trusted to extrapolate from your experiences…”

/I’m glad you think so./ “We’ll see what you think.” She wasn’t about to pin her hopes on this changing his deeply-inculcated prejudices… but she did know that a good theory, some interesting information, might do wonders to turn his scholar’s mind around, so there was always a chance. “Just give it a shot, Giles.”

“I will most definitely give it my full attention.” His voice was still shaking.

“Good.” She started her legs again, heading for the door. “We’ve got to take advantage of the sunset. I’ll round Dawn up. We need to give the bus back soon anyway. The Organization only borrowed it from this little rugby team or whatever because their season was over and they didn’t need it for a while. But we should eventually give it back so they can keep renting it out.”

Giles was silent for a moment, then, “Please, at least let me help you organize transportation back to the States. It’ll be difficult, not only monetarily, and with Dawn’s size, but with the added constraints of daylight and the rest…”

He was trying. It was… heartening. “If you want. Text me if you find something. If not, we’ll figure something out. Spike made it to Africa and back somehow, so there’s always a way.”

A wince, then, “Yes, I suppose that’s true. If nothing else, though, we can afford the fare for you out of Organization coffers…”

“We’re not really part of the Organization anymore.”

“You’re a Slayer,” Giles replied staunchly, and his voice was no longer trembling, had gone steady as a rock. “That, Buffy, will never change. The most senior, for that matter; have seen and done things none of the rest can even imagine. Even without that… you have access, at any time, to anything you need, for all of us.”

He still thought she had the right to the title. 

For now, it was enough. “Thank you, Giles,” she answered softly, and turning away, she left his office. And stepped out into Spike’s orbit. He waited, just outside the doors, eyes concerned and proud on hers. 

“You alright, Love?”

She kept her gaze on his so that he would know she was telling the truth, despite the crossed arms and the general ‘holding herself’ posture. He’d know she wasn’t completely dandy, but… “Yeah. Let’s just get out of here.”

His hand slipped to the back of her arm. “Got something to do first, alright?”

/Oh?/ “What’s that?”

“Got something to say to the Niblet. Think… maybe if you hang back…” 

Interesting. “What makes now different?”

“Trust me.”

She knew her eyes had kindled as she smiled a little at him. “Always.”

***

**S:**

Buffy was somewhere off out of the way. Near enough to, maybe, that he thought she might be able to hear, but not so close that Dawn would know she was about. Well and good. She’d be there if needed, same as he had been when she’d faced down Rupert. And Christ, that had been a revelation. A powerhouse performance; not that he had in any way doubted that his mate would bring Watcher to his knees. She could wreak havoc on any man’s soul. She was a phenomenon. 

He hoped like hell it was done, for her sake. That Giles would sod off and leave them alone for a while, maybe even realize eventually that they were doing alright without his nose in it. She needed him to do it; needed to salvage something from that once-imperative relationship. God knew Spike didn’t want to be the thing standing in the way of that for her; but she had chosen him, and nothing he could do about it now. Best just do all he was able to help.

He could start with the Niblet. “Oi! Dawn!”

The large form turned round from where she stood lurking about in the last bits of sunshine, there at the verge of the lawn. Saw him hovering in the shade of the copse of trees, on the steps of the leaning wreck of a gazebo. “Hey, Spike. What’s up?”

“Got a bit of info for you. ‘Bout the curse.”

“Oh, yeah?” She shambled nearer, not really much of a niblet right now despite his continued use of the nickname. Topped him by yards and had him by several stone, probably. Made two of him easily, and hell. She could pick him up and carry him about. No need to ask him for protection right now, for all her fancy talk. Bloody embarrassing. 

The ground didn’t quite shake as she threw herself down at his feet, but it was a near thing. “Yeah. Seems only your lad Kenny can break his own curse. Bit like a vengeance demon in that way, the mollusks…”

The large face promptly dropped into two hands. “Well, that’s it then,” Dawn’s muffled voice came out, sounding tragically resigned. “I guess I’m stuck this way forever…”

“Hold on there, Bit. Nothing says we can’t convince this Kenny of yours to take the thing off…”

“He won’t.” 

By the finality of the pronouncement, she sounded fairly convinced. Had to be a reason, of course, and Spike sighed heavily as he moved down to join her on the one strip of grass near her that still held some shade from the trees. “Dawn, for Chrissake, will you just tell me what happened, before I lose my bleedin’ mind? At least then I’ll understand. ‘Cause not knowin’ and watchin’ you hurt over it is drivin’ me out of my bug-shaggin’ gourd.”

She wanted to. He could tell. Could practically _feel_ her wavering on the verge; could smell the nervous sweat coming out on her, heard the abrupt rapidity of her immense heartbeat. “It’s alright, Bit. Won’t judge. Just want to help.”

Her voice shook. “Yeah you will,” she whispered. “Especially now that you and Buffy…” The large hand dropped to the grass, and for God’s sake, she had tears in her eyes, her strained face blushing and yet still pale as hell. “You might even hate me.”

“Could never hate you, Platelet. Not possible.” He made the assurance with as much certitude in his voice as he could muster, and prayed she might believe him. He wasn’t at all sure what he and Buffy had to do with whatever had gone on with her and this Kenny lad, but whatever it was, obviously it was truly messing with her head.

She wasn’t meeting his eye, and her heartrate was hitting a fever pitch. Loud damned thing too, at that size. He thought she might hyperventilate. But then… “It wasn’t Kenny,” she whispered. And shut up like a clam.

“It wasn’t… You sayin’ it wasn’t the thricewise cursed you?” How the hell did that make any bloody sense? If the chit had sent them off on a wild goose chase with this business of thricewise-curses, had them looking at entirely the wrong sort of magick the entire time…

“No.” The response came out choked, stuttered even. “Kenny… cursed me, but it wasn’t because we…” She gulped in a breath, and her heart palpitated a bit. “It was because… I didn’t. At least… not with _him_.” 

/Oh. Oh, hell./ “Who was it then, luv?” he asked, gently as he possibly could. And was startled when a hot tear splashed down from a large, miserable eye to explode on the ground like a vast, wet bomb. 

“I don’t blame him for being mad. For being… so hurt. I mean… He must’ve thought… that I was lying the whole time. That I, you know… actually _cared_. That he was a demon. Or that I was squicked out, you know? But it wasn’t that at all.” Her eyes fled to Spike’s, protesting loudly of her innocence in that regard. “It _wasn’t_.”

He held up his hands in capitulation. “Alright, Bit…” He was still thoroughly lost, though.

Accepting his belief, she glanced away again, voice relaxing a little. “I think it was because… I didn’t feel like I deserved how much he loved me, and it freaked me out that he did. So much, when _I_ wasn’t sure. How I felt, really, with everything. Because, I guess I expected something more…” She shook her head and looked down at her hands, clearly ashamed.

/Alright, now we’re getting to the core of it, whatever the hell it is. Best go gently./ “More what, Niblet?”

She shuddered. _“More_ … I dunno. Buffy always had all this life or death stuff happening in her relationships. Except with Riley, I guess. Her and Angel, and her and you. It was always so… passionate, like she couldn’t _live_ if…”

/Oh, Christ./ If the Bit was trying to model her love life on big sis… Buffy must be back there somewhere in the trees having kittens. He could feel the roiling somewhere in his blood right now; a borrowed horror to match his own.

“And Willow and Oz, and then Willow and Tara; they were just…like, welded together, you know? And even Xander and Anya. They had their ups and downs, but it was obvious that they were crazy about each other. And I dunno. Kenny and I were good, but…”

He fought not to sigh, not to rub a hand over his face, not to groan. “What happened, Bit?”

She was silent for a very long moment, and when she finally spoke, it was in a weary, resigned tone, though one still filled with tears. “I went to this party. ‘Disorientation’, it was called. A post-orientation party for all of us who made it through and got settled in. It’s kind of a tradition. It was a really good party, and I got… kind of drunk. And Kenny… He didn’t stay long. Said he had to study. And I guess I was maybe lonely. Maybe mad that he left. And maybe…”

“A bit anxious?” Spike supplied delicately. “You’re allowed, you know. You’re of age and all.”

Her shoulders hunched. “I was stupid. There was this guy. He was in the band…”

/Oh, hell./ “Don’t tell me he was the bloody drummer.”

She shot him an odd look. “Bass. And the singer.” She was still avoiding his eyes. “He smokes. Has messy hair. Wears studded leather…”

The realization slowly flooded Spike. He had to bite back the groan. /She wanted the danger. Not the sweet kid. The edgy one. Because of Buffy, and me, and oh, fuck…/

“He never paid any attention to me. Never seems to care what anyone thinks. And he always seems to be in some kind of pain.” She laughed at herself a little. “And, of course, he sings about it. I guess… I liked that…”

/Oh bloody, bloody Christ. Oh God…/

“Maybe I was dumb enough to think that meant he needed me. That it wasn’t just his hook.” She pulled in a deep, fortifying breath. “And, he’s Kenny’s roommate. Or was.”

“Oh hell, Niblet.”

Her shoulders hunched. “I knew you’d judge me.”

/Fuck./ “I’m not, Bit. I swear. It’s just… a road I’d hoped you’d never have to go down.” He let out the rest of his breath and wished for a fag. Not the right time, though. 

What it was time for was to put his own sensibilities aside and think of things from the perspective not of a man from his own era, but from how he wanted men to treat his Niblet. And one thing he sure as hell never wanted was for her to think she belonged to any wanker out there, like some sort of slave. Fuck that noise. He’d have her hear that message, if nothing else. Hell, if there was one thing he’d learned from a hundred years with Dru, it was that sex and love were two utterly disparate things, no matter how much it had hurt his romantic heart to learn it. 

Maybe there was a sodding reason for all that heartache after all, if he could pass on the bloody wisdom of the ages by it. “Thing is, when it comes right down to it, ‘ts your body, innit? You get to say what you do with it, yeah, and who touches you. Just because you were dating the thricewise doesn’t mean he owned you, or gets sole custody of…” He faltered, feeling oddly crude. Strange way to feel, considering he’d never had any issues discussing matters of sex before now, with anyone. But this was the Bit. He felt odd even cursing in front of her sometimes. Probably a holdover from Buffy’s hangups around the chit, mixed in with a bit of his own protectiveness. Ridiculous push-pull, wanting to help her grow up and wanting to protect her from the world. Bleedin’ nuisance, that. 

Dawn made a face at him and spoke up, saving him the trouble, thank Christ. “Isn’t that kind of implied in the dating thing?”

/Bloody hell./ “Maybe most think so, but if it’s not spelled out in the fine print as somethin’ you agreed to, then no.” He leaned in a bit, let his intensity speak for him. He’d drive this one home if nothing else landed. “You own you and no one else, alright, Bit? Never let any bloke, or anyone, for that matter, try to tell you otherwise, yeah?” He rubbed a hand over his face then, somewhat at a loss. “Problem is, the business with the bloke you chose instead bein’ human… Put that together with his own issues and it makes the whole bloody thing loads more complicated. Can understand why your lad was a bit miffed, with all that.”

“Can’t really call him my boyfriend anymore, after that.” Dawn shrugged philosophically, but with clear pain beneath the surface. “He was so hurt when Nick threw it in his face the next day. Because of course he did. Like I was just some kind of… conquest; you know, ‘Chicks dig the bad boys, sorry Kenny’…”

/What a little git./ And… exactly the type he’d been, once upon a time and not so sodding long ago, and why the hell was Dawn going after such an insecure sod?

“He didn’t get why Kenny took it so hard. And Kenny… didn’t know that it wasn’t about Nick being human. Not even a little bit. That it was about me. My stuff. But it’s fair; that he cursed me, and not Nick.” She picked up a bit of twig from the grass, tossed it away from herself. “You see why I can’t ask him to take it back? How can I even _face_ him?”

Spike rolled back on his tailbone, propped himself on his hands. /Bloody, bloody hell./ He could understand where the thricewise was coming from, for all of him. Had been there; or close enough to. Had watched a woman he worshiped like life give herself away to a human tosser who couldn’t appreciate the half of her, all the while looking at him as if he and his heart were worth jack shit. And he hadn’t even been an impressionable kid, barely capable of self-identification, much less able to stand up in his boots in the face of that kind of assault to his self-worth. To have a girl you loved—a human girl who had deigned to show interest and who was willing to look past all the demon-y bits—then turn around and seemingly say, at the last minute, ‘No, I’d rather have it off with another human when it comes down to brass tacks’… Yeah. It would be humiliating and incredibly painful, and a reinforcement of all those fears of inadequacy. 

So, yeah. He understood why the little pillock had done it. Couldn’t blame him for it, even, heat of the moment and all. 

But Kenny had to understand, would need to be made to understand; it wasn’t about him. The entire universe didn’t scroll around his slimy, mollusk arse. That Dawn had her own issues to contend with, many of them installed by yours truly. Maybe seeing the original model on his doorstep might even unravel the half of them on the spot. /Because if it’s a matter of imprinting, then here’s the bloody damned template, for better or fucking worse./ And he could stake himself for it, but what was done was done. “Thing is, Bit, you’re gonna have to face him sometime. He deserves to know the truth. Deserves the healing. And you don’t deserve to go on like this. However you may have hurt him, it wasn’t intentional, and you’ve got to get on. He has too; and maybe learn he doesn’t get to curse the people he dates if they don’t wanna shag him.” That startled Dawn a little, his neat bit of logic. Good. Might turn her guilt-trip on its head a bit. “And… maybe you’ll develop a better picker from here on out.” He could pray… if only so he could assuage his own guilt. “God knows we only don’t make the same mistakes again if we’re payin’ attention.”

“Buffy’s gonna kill me.”

/Hell./ “She won’t,” he answered staunchly. “Your sister’s been there and then some, Niblet. Made her own mistakes, and learned the difference between mistakes and just livin’ life. Learned not to make the same ones at twenty as at seventeen. Made new ones instead, yeah?” Thought he felt a ripple of amusement in the link between himself and Buffy. “Learned to make different ones again at twenty-two, ‘cause life’s a process, and eventually you figure things out. And at some point you can even pinpoint what were mistakes and what were just… growing pains. Believe me; I’m still makin’ mistakes at a hundred fifty. There’s always somethin’ to apologize for, even when there’s wrong on both sides.”

Dawn frowned fitfully. “I’m pretty sure she doesn’t think of you as a mistake.”

He scoffed at that. “She did for a good long while. And there are some things that went down between us that were definitely mistakes. Things we can never just say sorry for and move on. Things we gotta just keep workin’ on, day to day. You’re lucky this is something you can maybe just explain and fix it up, and maybe help the bugger grow out of his own issues to boot.”

Dawn looked dubious. “How do you even apologize for something like this? For hurting someone like I did?”

Spike grunted and pushed himself to his feet. “You get used to it, Dawn. You face it, you do it, you ask forgiveness. He does too.” /He bloody well better, I have anything to say about it./ “Each time you do it gets… not easier, but somethin’ you understand more every time. And along the way you learn which parts you should feel guilty about and which parts you shouldn’t, because they’re just a part of bein’ a person and living life. All part of growin’ up.”

“Well, it really, really sucks.”

Spike missed the days when he could kiss the top of her head. Hopefully they’d get them back soon. “Can do, Platelet, but there’re perks.”

She made a scoffing sound. “Like what? Driving and paying bills?”

He shrugged and dusted off his hands. “Makin’ your own decisions, for better or worse. And I promise, the shaggin’ part will get better as you go, too.”

“Well.” Dawn blushed a little, but pushed on as if determined to stick with the adult conversation. “That part… was pretty okay.”

/Good to know. Won’t have to kill this Nick twat, then./ “Alright then. That’s somethin’. ‘Cause if he didn’t do right by you, you know I was gonna have to go down there, find this tosser and teach him to show proper respect to a lady.”

Dawn’s lips twitched. “You spent five years having knockdown-dragouts with Buffy before you two started hitting it. How is that ‘proper respect for a lady’?”

He scoffed loudly. “That lady’s a Slayer. That _was_ proper respect. And that’s a whole other kind of respect than I was talkin’ about, and you know it. Any road, this nit thinks he’s so fantastic, he’d do well to meet…”

“What? The not-softer-side of Spike?”

Maybe she needed to learn to respect her elders too. “You were never properly scared of me, were you, Niblet?”

“You were never scary around me.”

/Christ, maybe if I was, you wouldn’t be in this mess./ 

Dawn thought he was going to be disappointed in her. He was going to be lucky to get out of this in one piece with Buffy. 

That was, if she wasn’t over there beating herself up about it as well.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
End of the Russia leg of the road trip. On to... hehe... Well, to tell you the next stop would be to take away a really great punch-line from the next bit's opener.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hee... Been wanting to get this particular ball rolling for a WHILE. I had to end it in a spot that irritates me more than a little (I apologize in advance, it's how the word-count broke down :-( ), but the next bit after this ought to be pretty satisfying, *g*
> 
> Hopefully it's well set up here.  
> Oh. We also get some clues in here as to ways in which the business with the Scourge set some ripples... rippling in the wider world, which will stand our kids in good stead in future.

_“It’s a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.”  
_

* * *

“Do you really think we need to go to Rome, Buffy?”

Buffy eyed him with clear surprise from her resting place beneath the spotty shade of the lay-by outside Utena, Lithuania. “That’s where I said I’d return the bus. Andrew will be heading back with his cell. He’ll meet with us there, send someone back with it. Why; what’s wrong with Rome?”

He really didn’t want her to see his discomfort, but… “Nothing much. Just got some history there.”

She looked to be suppressing some amusement. “I imagine you have some ‘history’ pretty much everywhere on this continent, Spike. Are we talking ancient history, or ‘last twenty years’ history? You know, something we actually need to be worried about?”

He preferred not to mention it particularly, being as it was rather a bit of both. “Thing is, wager I could get us a demon-run, or at least demon-friendly, cargo trawler or somesuch to take us round to the States, out of any sodding port in Europe. Make accommodations for the Bit, get me a nice, light-tight compartment somewhere for daytime. No problem; and if they give us any, you put the Slayer-driven fear of God into them. End of problem.” He shot her a smirk designed to puff her up, hoped it would work. She just watched him as if he were a new species of critter she was studying or something. /Well, push on./ “Not sure why we have to dip into Italy at all.” /Being as it’s a sodding disaster I never want to go back to./ “Might not even have to come up with the dosh for it, if Rupes is as good as his word on that front.” Hopefully she would miss that he was oh-so-carefully declining to mention his issues with the bloody country and its current inhabitant.

No such luck, though. She narrowed his eyes at him. “Seriously, Spike. Do I need to worry about Rome?”

Worry was maybe a bit of a stretch. “S’pose not. Just prefer to avoid it if we could.”

She was frowning at him now. “Well, all of Dawn’s things are there. It would save time if we bring them with us and put them in some storage in Berkeley for fall semester. She may have forfeited her spot in Summer Session, but she’s still enrolled for fall, and it’ll save us shipping costs if we just bring it all with us…”

“Assuming Kenny changes me back…” Dawn butted in, sounding fairly sure it wasn’t going to happen.

“Oh, he’ll take the bloody thing off you, Bit,” Spike growled as an aside. “No fear. Whether he wants to or not. And if he doesn’t, I flash some fang, let him know you came by your type honestly and that he’d better learn when to use his sodding curses, and he’ll be asking very nicely to put you back to your right size. End of.” Of course, how that came to their needing to piss off to Rome was a whole other debate.

Buffy rolled her eyes at his overprotective gesture. “And since I’m out of the overall Slayer picture, I should probably tell Mia she’s off the hook as decoy. Andrew said she took the risk and stayed behind to keep on that duty, because she was picking up some pretty interesting intelligence on the guy’s connections to the local clans…”

Spike bit off a bark of a laugh; a sort of a subterranean, ‘You think?’  
  
Bastard had connections to everybody in that shitehole of a city. Bloody puppeteer.

“Though, that she’d insist on staying with something like the Scourge on the way kind of makes me wonder. I mean, if she likes dating the Immortal, fine… but based on what she’s told me, I’m betting it’s a dedication to duty thing, and I’m guessing she’d rather have a new mission. One more heavy on the slayage and less wrapped up in just partying every night with some guy who has fourteen other girlfriends…”

Spike muttered a few choice words under his breath about worthless, syphilitic sods. 

A’ course, he hadn’t expected Buffy to hear him, per se. “What was that?”

“Nothing, luv.”

“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. What’s your problem with the Immortal?”

/Damn it all to hell./ “Nothing. Never mind. Let’s just sodding go and get it over with.”

Buffy looked less than fooled by his capitulation. Probably because in spite of his best efforts he sounded like a petulant teen; even to his own ears. Consequently she crossed her arms to watch him with some interest. “Spike.”

He shot for innocent. “Well. I was just thinking. Sod thinks he’s dating you, yeah? Even if you call off your girl, no doubt if we stay too long it’s bound to cause problems, innit? He might catch wind of the visit, think you’re the bint has been on his arm, expect somethin’ you’re not wantin’ to give. Might come ‘round and want a bit of canoodling or what have you, and that’s bound to get awkward. Especially for Andrew and his girls, if this Mia bird’s been involved with him.”

Buffy narrowed her eyes at him, now very thoroughly suspicious. “Not likely, since like I said, I’ll be retiring her. Andrew will take off the glamor; which is good, since he seemed to think it was supposed to be some kind of a joke anyway…”

“He _what?”_ Outrage roared through Spike in retrospect. “That little buggering bastard!” 

That earned him a couple of raised eyebrows. “What, you think he was just trying to trick you and Angel into leaving me alone or something?”

Spike could scarcely speak, he was so choked with ire. 

The surprise faded into a slightly thoughtful expression. “Hm. Could be, I guess. He really does have a weird sense of humor. But there really was a good reason. There _was_ someone following me…”

/Well, bloody hell./ “That was Peaches. Had someone on you; so he’d know if you ever needed help, or…”

That earned him a faint glare. “Well, Angel should know better,” she answered flatly.

He had to admit that was true. Not that he didn’t applaud the man’s motivations when it came to getting information on her whereabouts and activities. Still; considering that it had driven her underground… “He just wanted to know that you…” /Were alright. Bloody hell, I guess it does sound patronizing./ “You know, you weren’t talking to him. _No_ one was anymore.” /And why in the name of Christ am I defending the prat? He probably more just wanted to know her business much as anything; keep tabs on what she was up to./

Even if he’d thought to continue, her flat gaze cut him off. “Anyway, when we tell Mia the mission’s over, she can break it off with the Immortal. Then whatever the guy thinks, if he comes around when we’re in town and tries to talk me into starting things back up again I can just tell him I’m involved with someone else.”

Horror flooded him, making his belly flutter all hollow. “Oh, Christ. Buffy, can we please just go to Greece or summat? Bleedin’ Barcelona or Marseille or some other bloody place besides Rome?” It burst out of him without his cognizance as he reached the end of his tether. Because just the thought of her, the real Buffy, meeting that sodding tosser and falling to his wiles after everything they’d been through—of losing her to him—was truly more than he could bear.

“Wow. Okay…” Walking right up to him, she caught his arm and pulled him away from the front of the coach where Dawn was lounging against the grille and watching them with interest. Tugged him further under the shade of the spindly trees that lined the little rest stop. “Seriously,” she hissed, “what’s the problem?”

Bloody hell. She was going to think he was an insecure git, but she just didn’t fucking know. She had no idea. It took him a moment of breathing through his nose before he was calm enough to manage an answer. “I take it you haven’t actually met the bastard?”

She was eyeing him like he’d lost his mind. “The Immortal? No. Heard about him, of course. He’s got quite the reputation, but I don’t think half that could possibly be earned. And anyway, I’m not sure how that has anything to do with anything…”

Spike knew he was vibrating. Talking through his teeth, and couldn’t care a whit right now. “You need to stay away from him. He’s some kind of incubus or something. Christ only knows. He’ll cast some kind of sodding spell on you, or… Hell, I don’t know. Buffy, let’s just go somewhere else. Send for Dawn’s things…”

“Spike.” Her hand was on his face, her verdant eyes quiet on his and seeking. “What the hell happened with this guy? I’ve never seen you so unwilling to face anyone down.”

It ripped out of him; quiet and pained. “He’ll take you away, Buffy. He’ll take you away from me just like he did Dru.”

She blinked, startled. “When did…”

“Never mind. He’s a bloody warlock or something when it comes to women, and as far as he’s concerned, third time’s the buggerin’ charm. He made out like a bandit against me an’ Angelus the last time we went to that stinking city, made us look like fools—both times!—and he’ll do it again…”

He trailed off at the half-stunned, half-amused look in her eyes. Couldn’t stand it. “Don’t mock me, dammit; this is serious! You think I’m bein’ an insecure git, but you don’t know! He’s unstoppable; like some kind of…”

“Mia says he’s kind of boring after a while. That, yeah, at first he’s fun, and a hell of a lover; but after a while you realize it’s pretty much a repetition of the same ten things you know he’s used on everyone he’s ever been with. And after a while you start to hear the same stories over and over again; all about him. He sounds kind of impressed with himself, actually.” She shrugged a little disdainfully. “I was curious at first, I’ll admit. Kind of wondered if he was where the whole Don Juan story came from, or Casanova or whatever. Sounded like a nice, no-strings way to get some energy out…”

Spike didn’t know whether to growl, bury his face in his hands, or howl imprecations at the sky.

“…But it sounds like really he’s just mostly a giant jerk. And…” A slow smile entered her voice. “The thing about guys like that is, whether they’re the biggest football player on the team or Don Juan, after a while you realize you don’t want to be just one of the girls on the list. No personalized moves; just part of the routine.” A foot slid out to nudge his boot. “You get to thinking… you kinda wanna dance with someone who knows _your_ moves. Knows exactly what you like. Knows how to mix it up just the way you want it. Knows how to read you.” Spike lifted his eyes to meet hers, feeling a soaring sense of awe as the meaning of her words percolated. And saw her reassuring smile, with just a tinge of invitation. “Knows how to make you laugh, make you cry; will do those things _with_ you. And only wants _you_.”

/Oh, Christ Buffy…/

“So… yeah,” she told him quietly. “If you don’t have that, why not fool around for a while? But if you do…”

“No reason to look elsewhere,” he finished for her, quietly, because he’d been there for a long bloody time. But he hadn’t thought…

“You don’t need to worry, Spike.” She moved in a little closer, her hands sliding in under his duster to his waist, up along his belly, his ribs. “Though… now I kinda wanna hear all these stories that have you so twisted u…”

He stopped her mouth with his. Partly because he really didn’t want to honor that request right now, and partly because, Christ, did she have any idea how perfect she was? Any clue at all?

Bloody hell; it was going to bewilder the fuck out of that sod when Buffy turned him down to his face and closed the door on him.

All of a sudden, Spike couldn’t wait to go back to Rome.

***

“It’s a tossup,” Buffy muttered, looking out at the vista before them. They were pulled off to the side of the road outside Settebagni, about forty-five minutes north of metropolitan Rome, pondering their next move. “You could either come all the way into the city with us, Dawn, but we’d have to figure out where to stash you somewhere down near the harbor, like maybe on the Riserva… or you could stay here, I guess. But either way we’re gonna have to go in without you, since...” She trailed off, no doubt because there was really no easy way to say it other than to just spit it out. However, the fact of the matter was… there just weren’t accommodations inside any city for giants to do what was necessary. 

At base, Dawn would be relegated to camping until she was able to fit into loos again.

“No, I get it.” Bit frowned a little sadly. “I kinda wish I could see the apartment again, but it’s cool. I’m just kind of amazed you’re letting me stay by myself.”

“Well, you’re technically an adult now, you’ve lived on your own for a month, this isn’t a hellmouth… and we’re not currently in an apocalypse.” Buffy ticked off the points with what Spike felt was admirable self-restraint considering that, far as he could determine, she still was still fighting to give space. She might not entirely have a minor nervous breakdown anymore whenever she left her precious, disaster-prone sister unattended for more than an hour, but it might give her a bit of a turn to leave the Niblet alone for a day or what have you while they wandered about the city, miles away.

He might have a problem staving off some small shreds of panic himself, come to that. Dawn was just the sort who could find trouble by standing still. /Minds me of me./ There was a reason he loved the chit. Like called to like. 

Besides; Rome had all those old, entrenched demon clans ready to fight at the drop of a hat and wanting all these niceties observed whenever anyone stepped foot across their invisible boundaries and the lot. Load of rubbish. He hated these older cities, now he thought of it. The New World had a lot to recommend it with the more footloose and fancy-free wheeling and dealing that went on in them. Lot more chaos and political upheaval, always some change in the air, things at sixes and sevens half the time every time someone got offed, like as not. 

Not everywhere was a hellmouth, of course, but still. Bunch of tradition-minded, stodgy sticklers here in places like this. Too much bowing and scraping. Was the reason he’d left.

Angelus and Darla had loved blowing into a town in Europe and creating chaos. Making a name for themselves and leaving the standing order in ruins. He’d once thought it a right thrill as well. Now he just wanted to leave them all to their games and go somewhere less dull; somewhere it might be easier not to step wrong. But then, he had something to protect, now, and something to live for that required a certain amount of circumspection in his dealings when extricating himself and others from high-tension situations.

Made a lot of bleeding difference in the way one navigated one’s social surroundings. “Might be best to stay out here, Niblet. Down by the harbor’s got its own clan of madmen running things. Do you move the wrong way and offend someone, who knows what could happen.”

Buffy frowned. “He’s got a point. There’s, what? Three clans down there? The Cravagios, the Garavas, and the Viggios?”

“Oh, yeah?” he returned, somewhat interested, and lifted a fag to his lips. “Cravagios took a slice of the docks, did they? Huh. They were mostly bars and cantinas, last I was here for any length of time.”

Buffy looked surprised at this little bit of exposition. “When was _that?_ I thought they’ve been down there forever.”

“Oh, I dunno… fifty-two, I think?”

“So, forever.”

He shot her a withering look and pulled in some smoke. “Be nice, pet.” Turned to Dawn. “Should be enough food an’ that in here to last you several hours, yeah?”

“I’ll be fine. But how the heck are you two gonna get into the city? And I thought the whole point of the bus was to use it to get the stuff down to the boat…”

Buffy looked a little uncertain to be faced with these rather pertinent questions. “We’ll, um, come back for you once we’ve figured out the transportation. Get the stuff into the bus quick and head down to the docks…”

Spike pushed away from the side of the vehicle, eyes on a nearby prize. “Got us covered on the other.”

“Where the heck is _he_ going?” Dawn demanded of Buffy as he marched into the growing dusk. 

“I have _no_ idea.”

Where he was going was to inspect a motorbike that had been left all on its lonesome off to one side of the lay-by by some unsuspecting commuter or tourist or somesuch. A Moto Guzzi, it looked like, which was right enough to be going on with, and easy enough to pop the ignition with a little work from the fingers in the right places, and of course a little extra wrangling from that hairpin he’d always kept in the one duster pocket for such purposes. Never had entirely gotten round to getting rid of it, seeing as it was part of his identity. And besides; never knew when you might need one.

Buffy was beside him before he was finished, of course. _“No,_ Spike.”

Killjoy. “Look, we need the ride.” He lifted his chin, fingers still working, to cast about them. The area was denuded of other vehicles, traffic was desultory at best. What did she want them to do, pull a bleedin' carjacking? “See any cabs out here? And it’s not like we’re stealing it permanent. We’ll leave it somewhere easy to find on the way out of town. Bloke will miss it, what? Less than twenty-four hours…”

“We’ll be _stranding_ someone here.”

“They’ll call the _polizia_ to report the theft. Cops’ll give him a lift into town.” What was her problem? His soul was giving him no issues on this, considering he wasn’t actually stealing it, per se. /This is borrowing in good cause, Buffy. At best it’ll inconvenience someone. No one’s gonna bloody die./ Maybe his human side had been in contact with his demon for too long and had permanently lost a lot of his stuffy old precepts, but all the better to get along in the world, far as he was concerned. Too much to hold one back in all that rot he’d once carried, first time around. 

What, did she think getting the soul back meant he was going to sit on his hands and eat pap the rest of his bloody long unlife? They still had to manage in a bitch of a world. He’d hardly be the first being with a soul to make a few buggering concessions. /This isn’t even the first bike I’ve stolen since. Leastaways, if you can count that bloody Vespa as one./ And what was it with Rome and his having to nick wheels for things?

“Spike,” Buffy hissed, torn, and her hand came out to stop him. Hovered above his.

/For Chrissake./ “Just let me nick the bike, luv. Not takin’ it forever. Quick joyride. Not doin’ any permanent harm, and we need it. For the greater good, yeah?”

She let out a sigh in a heavy gust. “God, now you’re just gonna justify being you with ‘for the greater good’ post-its when you wanna get your jollies off, right?”

He finished popping out the ignition ring, slipped it into his pocket, and couldn’t stop the faint, stilted note in his voice as he answered. “Wasn’t aware I had to justify being me, Buffy. Never did make much pretense about it.”

It hung between them, because in a way this was a lot more of a sticking point than the blood or any number of other things. She wasn’t a cop, but she had that… _thing_. Bits of leftover righteousness in her blood that made her want to push a bloke about for stepping over random lines in the sand that she chose to hold fast in the most bizarre places, and… When it came right down to it, they both knew the truth. He’d never pretended to be anything else but what he was… except in his fake-it-till-you-make-it phase, for her. But all it had ever been was a patina painted over who he truly was at base; a restraint set above his raging impulses and his need for stimulation, same as when she was forced to sit still when she was itching for a good shag or a fast slay. Even with his William-side up front to afford him a bit of extra patience and to keep him from things like straight up murder, when the chips were down and things were rolling he was still a demon with a soul riding pig-a-back. When it came to petty crimes as didn’t really hurt anyone, said soul wasn’t exactly fussed. It had seen enough, participated in enough real sodding life over the years to bow to the demon’s sensibilities and pragmatism. As such he’d still rather do things quickly, with maximum entertainment and a bit of adrenaline; only did them ‘the right way’ when it came to expedience. 

A balance had had to be found in the last year and change, and that balance was simply that he knew where he stood on the line of his conscience when it came to the things he considered unforgivable. There was, however, a damnable lot that was, by this point in his life, vast gray area, because William? William had, after all, been long since set free from certain sociocultural strictures, and celebrated that freedom. /Figure it out, pet; the soul didn’t turn back time for me. I’m not that repressed Victorian lad anymore./   
  
The soul wasn’t about ‘playing by the rules’. It was about not joyfully murdering people for the fun of it. Full stop. /I’m all me, all the same bloke, whether you call me Spike or William. It’s just… William is Spike-lite. Easy on the destruction, a little guilty if I actually damage someone. But if something’s all in good fun…/ Hell. /If that business with paying our subway passes back in LA confused you, Buffy, that’s your problem. Not about to go round taking the extra time and effort every second just to soothe your sensibilities, and you know it./   
  
Take him or leave him. It was just, he finally felt secure enough in their relationship to put his foot down and say it without caving. /And besides; how is ‘borrowing without destroying’ different than ‘snacking but not killing’?/

He knew she was thinking it by the way she looked away. Saw it in the way her fingers twitched on her one hip. And then she looked back, toward Rome. Blew out a breath.

And gave in. “Just for today.”

Relief, and he inhaled, realizing only then that he had in all honesty forgotten to keep up the appearance of breathing for a mo’. “‘Course. Said it already, yeah?”

“And we drop it off somewhere close to a police station if we can.”

He rolled his eyes skyward for this added bit of foofaraw, but he also nodded. “Done.” And pushed the now quick-start ignition. “We’re off, then?”

***

Civitavecchia was an odd port town in that most of them tended to be more commercial. This one was more of a place to get a nice cruise in; to Sardinia or Malta or the like. Not a lot of freight came up the Tiber anymore, these days, most coming overland of late. A bit did, of course, but more tour-boats and the like. 

What this meant, though, was that finding the kind of accommodations they needed would be somewhat stickier a proposition. It also meant that finding the right kind of pub would be a little more of a tough sell. Granted, Rome was bizarre in that you didn’t have to go seedy to find demons in a bar, either. Much of the time, depending on where you went, demon sorts were out even in the plain light of day, drinking with the human-folk like there was nothing to it.

Bizarre. Went right against the sensibilities, but there it was. There were, of course, some carefully-hidden-away specialty places for the ones as couldn’t hide their faces amongst the humans, but even those were fairly clean and well-kempt sorts of establishments. Aged, with gorgeous facades, and really, the entire thing just made him anxious. 

“Gives you the wig, doesn’t it?” Buffy asked astutely, if in her standard, shorthand vernacular as they eyed the place she’d chosen for their first attempt. 

It was just so bloody… neat. “Just doesn’t seem right, yeah?”

“We can go somewhere else if this one’s a bust. But we’re kind of hoping for ‘passing as human’ for this one, right? Rough but not too rough?”

“Guess.”

They pushed inside together, eyed the crowd for a moment in the well-lit interior. A mix of human and mixed-descent, looked like. Bunch of part-Brachens and half-Ano Movics haggling over in the corner. A little gaggle of Turpins chattering about God knew what in low tones in quick, rapid-fire Italian over a circle of grappa glasses in the center of the room, the laid-back, spindly horns on their heads carefully-hidden in long strands of hippie-like hair. A few loners of varying types at the bar itself, hunched over their pints.

Oddly, the place seemed to go a little quiet as they entered. Or maybe it wasn’t odd, since Buffy had lived in Rome for damn near a year, and her decoy remained thereafter. Most demons tended to sit up and take notice when a Slayer entered a demon establishment; but this was a different sort of silence. Less watchful or anxious and more… Oddly reverent-feeling, which just had to be wrong. 

Buffy cased the place swiftly and led the way to an open booth off to one side. He followed her and slid into the seat across from her, fiddled anxiously with a paper coaster with a bunch of Italian on it that no doubt listed it as the best demon hangout in three districts or somesuch. 

In only moments, the barkeep himself sidled up; a pale, waxy sort with clear Grevaroch heritage in there somewhere. His eyes slid over Spike with faint recognition—not of his face but of his species—before landing on Buffy. “Welcome, Slayer. What will you wish?” His English was barely accented, flawless, his intonation less anxious than… merely curious. It had an odd lilt in it, though, as if he wanted to say something but was uncertain if it would be taken well.   
  
Buffy favored the barkeep with a tight but amiable smile. “I’ll have just a soda water; lemon if you have it.”

“And your vampire friend?” he asked, turning to Spike.

Before Spike could open his mouth, Buffy was answering for him. “He’ll have your best middle-of-the-road whiskey. Neat.”

Spike blinked and turned to eye her with no small amount of shock. The bleedin’ bint had just ordered for him. Done it right too. /Well, fuck./ 

The barkeep’s gaze flashed toward him and away again; possibly checking his neck for a collar, before nodding and turning to head back for the bar. 

“We need something else, if you have a second,” Buffy spoke up, catching the bloke mid-stride.

Barkeep turned back to eye her askance. “Anything I can do to help.”

Now, that was interesting. His tone of voice had turned, just in that moment, from politely welcoming and reserved to an undertone of throbbing gratitude and willingness just shy of deference, which was less along the lines of ‘keeping the peace while the local Slayer was in the building’ and more ‘I have a personal reason to be thankful the Slayer exists’. Which, as everyone knew, was a bit of a stretch for most demons; even the generally inoffensive ones.

Buffy exchanged a brief glance with Spike. He answered it with a, ‘Hell if I know’ look, and she turned back to the barkeep to go on with the script. “We need a ship captain. Demon-friendly. Someone who might be willing to arrange passage for three people; one of them needing special accommodation. Heading out soon; for the US. Know anyone like that?”

If the barkeep was surprised he didn’t show it, just nodded once and turned, heading back for his station.

Time to wait. 

A few minutes later their drinks arrived, care of an anxious-looking Nanott with filed-down elbow-spikes and a complexion mottled with uncertainty. She made off swiftly before they could even attempt to engage her in conversation, not that they were planning on trying it. A few tense minutes passed thereafter, spent sipping in silence, before Buffy spoke up. “Good whiskey?”

He jerked at that. “Alright. Nothin’ on what Rupes probably had stashed away, but it’ll do.” 

“I won’t ask to try it then. I think I have expensive tastes.”

He smirked a bit at that. “Thought you were tryin’ to keep a clear head, anyway.”

Her eyes sparkled at him. “I am. We’ll save drunk Buffy for another time.” And he was startled to see a suggestive smile growing on her face. “I don’t think we’ve ever fully gone there, you know, since we started really… being us. It sounds… interesting.”

That it did. Actually, the thought of how abandoned she’d likely be, lying with her in her cups to that degree, sounded truly a succulent experience, and one not to be taken for granted. But. Business to attend to first. Damned distracting wench. 

“You’re not bugged that I ordered for you, are you?”

“What?” He was startled all over again, since his mind was hell and gone from that subject by this point. “Oh.” He glared briefly into his tumbler, as if uncertain where it had come from. “Was a bit surprised at first, but it wasn’t like you were wrong.”

“Next time we get food you can order something for me.”

He scoffed in her general direction. “I’ll save that for a time when I think I won’t get my head caved in for it.”

“I just gave you a get out of jail free card.”

“Yeah, but this was kind of a sure thing, Buffy. What a person wants to eat can change on a dime…”

“Hear you wanted a ship?”

Their heads jerked up and they turned as one to regard the newcomer. They’d been so caught up in their little pseudo-debate that they hadn’t noticed the fellow’s approach, which was probably a bit of a rotten oversight, in a place like this. 

Luckily, he was an inoffensive sort. Actually, to Spike’s surprise, he was a Lister; or at least a part-Lister, judging by how light the grayish-blue tones were in his somewhat human-toned features. The Lister coloration was well-hidden by the fact that his human heritage was Black. Handy, that. 

Interesting to run into a Lister cross at all. Spike had thought most of them had been wiped out by the Scourge. This poor blighter must be damn near alone in the world; had probably survived by the simple expedient of staying on the go. “Yeah, that’s right. You got one?”

“I move things—and sometimes people—to the US and back along the north Mediterranean on the regular.” By his accent he was originally from the States; maybe Midwest somewhere? How the hell had he ended up on the sea? “What’re you lookin’ to move? Or who?”

Buffy took over. “Myself. The vampire. And a giant.”

That last took the Lister by obvious surprise. “Just… how big of a giant we talkin’?”

“Fifteen feet or so. You’d need to be able to make a special accommodation on deck for her to use some area as a… Well, a toilet space she could fit into. And make an area big enough for her to sleep in. And Spike here would need a place to get out of the sun. Other than that…”

The Lister frowned thoughtfully. “We could maybe rig that. Ship’s big enough.” Oddly-colored eyes touched briefly on Spike. “Blood requirements?”

“Taken care of.” /Or will be./ He ignored Buffy’s barely-audible exhale. “Got a fridge somewhere I can access, I’ll be alright.” 

“Interesting.” The Lister’s eyes flickered to Buffy’s, clearly wondering why a Slayer and a vampire were palling around, but he didn’t ask. “Special dietary requirements for the giant?”

“Just a lot,” Buffy answered. “Teenage appetite.”

That earned them a frown. 

“Got a little cargo, too,” Spike warned. 

It didn’t seem to faze the fellow. “How much?” 

Buffy shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe six, seven boxes. A couple bags.”  
  
“No problem.”

Buffy frowned a little at the quick answer, clearly thrown and getting suspicious. “Everyone’s being awfully cooperative in here today,” she pointed out.

Spike couldn’t blame her for feeling a little put off by it, honestly. She was, after all, the local Slayer, or had been, and they _were_ demons. It was odd as hell.

The Lister appeared to tremble slightly, as if he were going through a sort of internal war, and then, “Rumor has it you and your people… wiped out the Scourge.”

“Oh.” Buffy nodded carefully. “Yeah. We just came back from that fight.”

Lister’s eyes jerked from hers to Spike’s and back again. “No charge. On the trip. On the modifications. Any of it.”

Spike narrowed his eyes. “That’s a bit of a stretch, mate. We told you we’d be takin’ up some cargo space, yeah? We’ll be losin’ you a bit of revenue if you don’t charge us. What’s your game?”

Lister just shook his head and slapped a piece of paper down on the table. “My ship’s called ‘Fortuna Grata’. Slip fourteen at Harbor Three. Leaving tomorrow at…” He glanced over at Spike. “We’ll wait for late evening. Ten.”

“Why the bloody hell…” Spike began at the same time as Buffy.

Clearly just as suspicious, his bird leaned forward to demand, “Listen, it’s not like we’re not grateful, it’s just it’s hard to believe someone would be so generous without there being anything in it for them. Why…”

They were interrupted by a tight, pained voice. “The Scourge killed every Lister I know. My family, my friends, _their_ friends…” The hollow face tightened still further, skull-like. “There’re only a few of us left in the world. Those bastards hunted the half-Brachens to near-extinction too, were going after the Movics next. A lot of us…” A grayish-brown hand lifted to wave around the bar. “But they got most of my kind.” Haunted eyes landed on theirs, burning. “You _ended_ them. You go anywhere you want. _Free of charge.”_ And pushing himself away from their booth, he turned toward the door. 

/Oh. Well, hell./ Spike’s eyes sought Buffy’s, feeling the weight now of demon-regard from nearly every countenance around the bar. Half-demons and part-demons, watching them with interest and even gratitude as they realized who was sitting over there. The Slayer who’d led the charge against the Scourge, and the vampire who’d helped.

The unwanted notoriety explained the hush that had laid over the place since they’d walked in, the barkeep’s odd deference, everything.

/Christ./ It was like LA all over again.

***

**B:**

  
Buffy knocked on the door to the apartment she’d once occupied in Rome, felt the echoes of Spike’s surprise rolling faintly over their linkage as she did so. “What?”

“I dunno; I just thought… Technically it’s your place, yeah?”

/Well, I guess so, but…/ “I haven’t lived here in months, Spike,” she pointed out logically enough. “It’s more Mia and Andrew’s place, now.”

“Yeah, I guess. Hope you can still invite me in, if the wee poof disinvited me after the last time.”

“Huh.” She hadn’t thought of that. “Mia’ll invite you if I ask her to.”

That assumption earned her a tolerantly sardonic look. _“Vampire_ , luv. ‘S not exactly somethin’ that makes me the most popular with the Slayer set.”

She could do without the satire. “I’ve got seniority,” she answered grimly, and tossed him a faintly amused glance over her shoulder. Still, best to take it under advisement, considering the reception they’d gotten, in the long run anyway, back in Scotland. “Just try to look… sweet and harmless, alright?”

“Bloody hell; I’m gonna wind up toothless as a Torug before the year’s out if I…”

She cut off the whining to throw him a bone, and fought to keep the amusement from infiltrating her voice. “You can steal another motorcycle later if it’ll make you feel better.”

He muttered something under his breath that involved the words ‘sodding biddable’ and ‘collar’.

“That could be interesting,” she answered speculatively; a throwaway comment she had not meant to garner her anything but a sneer, but which instead brought him up short and choked off all reply in a surge of what was, unmistakably, stunned lust, flowing through their blood-bond like a river in spate. Which was even more interesting, and note to self to pursue that line of questioning at a later date. 

Handcuffs, they had done. But…

Well.

Anyway… Conversation for another time. Taking advantage of the shocked, speculative silence, she knocked again, a little more forcefully this time. “ _C’mon_ , Mia. God, do you think she’s already out with him? It’s barely eight.”

Spike cleared his throat, obviously fighting for composure. Drew in a long breath, sniffing. “Can’t be sure. Place just smells like…” Then he paused, frowning. “Christ, how the hell did I miss it before? She’s a decoy enough, yeah, that she smells a bit like you. The spell got that much right…” His voice roughened to self-denigrating ire. “But she doesn’t smell _that_ much right. I should bloody know! I mean, fool Peaches, sure. It’d been the hell of a while for him, but for me; bloody hell, I must’ve been out of my head to even think…”

Buffy smiled at that, turned a little to pat him on the arm. “It’s a very good spell. You’d probably have gotten it right if she was right in front of you. Maybe you both would. Did Andrew keep trying to hustle you both out of the place before she could come back?”

Spike growled something unintelligible that promised dire repercussions for duplicitous blond sorcerers.

/I love you, Spike/ Buffy thought quietly, and opened her mouth to repeat the words aloud. She never got the chance, though. Footsteps sounded on the far side of the door, and it opened a crack. And Buffy found herself face-to-face with her own visage. Which was odd, but then she’d never met any of the decoys in person before. It was kind of like looking in a mirror and having it really not act right at all. Like the mirror had taken on a life of its own; one which moved wrong and independently and was totally dressed not for ease of movement, practicality, and general slayage, but for the nightlife. Mia’s make-up was half-done, too, which meant clearly Buffy’s Rome counterpart was on her way out shortly to continue her ‘party with the Immortal in the name of duty’ mission.

Weird to think that Buffy herself used to spend nearly every evening doing the same thing, if at a less glitterati establishment; and not even for duty’s sake, but just to blow off steam. /Granted, that was before I discovered a whole other kind of dancing, and how very damned much better that can be for the blowing off of steam-age./ No one could accuse the Bronze of being high-class, what with the roaches and all. Still, she had seldom missed a chance to dress up and dance the night away, either pre- or post-Restfield. /But that was pre-death Buffy. Pre-Glory Buffy./ Seemed like another life. 

Well, in a way it really _was_. “Hey, Mia,” she managed blandly.

The doppelganger stared back at her for a moment, hand absently rising to the back of her neck to rub at the vamp-tingles there. She was clearly not paying much attention at the moment to the warning, too busy being shocked at Buffy’s abrupt appearance to take note of her instinctual response to a vampiric presence on the doorstep. Which was pretty sloppy, but Buffy would give her a pass just this once because, A), her unheralded arrival was probably a much greater shock than that of a vampire, especially in Rome where demons tended to be slightly more genial and even to carry messages for their various sponsors; and B) it saved Spike (and herself) a great deal of hassle in the long run. “Buffy?”

“In the flesh. Can we come in? We’ve got some new developments to tell you about, and a kind of a proposition for you…”

“We?” As if her words had clued Mia’s mind into the fact of his presence, alarmed eyes jerked over to Spike and seemingly registered his existence for the first time. At which point she jumped back into the apartment, her hand fleeing to her waist for a stake that wasn’t there. As promptly, though, confusion filtered into her features, along with the recognition that Buffy was just standing there next to this invading vampire, easy as you please, and that said vamp was doing nothing whatever that could in any way be construed as threatening… unless one counted smirking and bringing a cigarette to one’s lips while leaning casually against the doorjamb to be threatening, which was doubtful.

/I mean, _I_ used to consider it threatening, but that was because it turned me on and that scared the shit out of me. But that’s a whole other saga./ “Mia, this is Spike. He’s friendly. I’ve known him for years.” /In both the acquaintance sense and the biblical one. Heh./ “And he’s been here before. Andrew might even have mentioned him. Heck; he might even still have an invite to your place, unless Andrew took it off after his last visit…”

That earned them both another startled look. “Oh. Ah…”

“So, can we come in and talk?”

“Oh,” she repeated blankly. “Ah… I suppose?” 

Mia was clearly anxious, but she didn’t stop them from coming in. Buffy waited just inside the doorway for Spike to hit an invisible barrier which would require them to request safe passage from the current denizen, while he moved warily toward the open portal. But he passed through without incident, which said a number of things about Andrew. Either their dorky friend had not thought it worth the effort to disinvite his undead visitors, their being stationed over on the other side of the Pond… or despite the fact that there was a secret to protect he had still, in the long run and despite his current association with an untrustworthy Angel, trusted Spike, the invitation remaining open for at least one vamp.

The clear invite must have told Mia something, because she relaxed a hair when Spike sauntered in sans difficulty. Moving over to the center of the room, she stood sort of nervously over by the couch and waved at it. “Ah, please, take the sofa…” Her soft, Italian accent sounded odd coming from her Buffy-alike face. Hopefully she pretended better when she was with the Immortal. Not that that guy knew what the real Buffy sounded like, but he had to know she wasn’t Italian. 

Buffy sat, Spike taking up his usual station to her immediate left. Mia moved uncertainly to take a seat across from them on the coffee table and settled her hands between her knees. “Ah… to what do I owe the pleasure? I’m sorry, I must warn you, I am expecting a visitor shortly. I’m meant to be leaving soon…”

Beside Buffy, Spike stiffened measurably, tension rolling off of him in prompt and palpable swells. She slipped a hand to his knee, squeezed; a move Mia caught with a start. The younger Slayer’s eyes jerked up from the illicit motion to their faces, stunned. 

Buffy didn’t give her time to stutter into shocked-questions mode. “The Immortal?”

Startled out of English and utterly thrown off of her conversational track, Mia sputtered back into her native tongue. _“Scusi?”_

Spike chuckled. Clearly despite the subject matter, he was enjoying the way they were throwing off her former compatriot. The dope.

Buffy fielded Mia's startled question, having picked up enough Italian in her not-quite-a-year in the city to get by. It was no French, but she could manage well enough on root words and slang to pick out what the heck was going on most of the time. “He’s the one coming by soon, right?”

“Oh. Yes. Any time now. I’m meant to be finishing my face…” She waved a hand over her mostly-made-up visage. “Or, I suppose, your face,” she qualified, blushing slightly. 

“It _is_ weird,” Buffy agreed with a faint smile. 

_“Bloody_ strange,” Spike chipped in heartily. Strain sang off of him once more, in ringing waves. 

“Well… we need to get down to business, then, before he gets here.” Buffy leaned forward to engage with her decoy. “Here’s the deal, Mia. I don’t know how you feel about this assignment, or about the Immortal, but what you’re doing isn’t necessary to the Organization anymore. I’m retiring, which means all my decoys can also retire. Which kind of kills the whole ‘dating the Immortal as me’ thing. Which… If you’re really enjoying it, I’m sorry about that, but if you, you know, want to get back to actual _slaying_ …”

Mia had gone very still. “You are leaving the Organization?”

“I am.”

“But you _founded_ the Organization. You are the senior member! The Leader!”

/And, here we go again./ Buffy shrugged a little, fighting to remind herself that it shouldn’t hurt. That she had _chosen_ this. “Organizations tend to resent it when you choose to fraternize with the enemy over their own goals. I’ve been fraternizing with Spike here for years.” Ignoring Mia’s gaping mouth, she pressed on flatly. “That choice has come into conflict with my role as leader. I’ve decided I’m doing the Organization more harm than good by staying, so I’m stepping down. I’ll be disaster-relief from now on, like Faith. Dial in case of apocalypse.”

Mia looked heartily shaken. “The… With…”

“It’s a long story.”

“I… suppose it must… _Mio Dio;_ does… Does Andrew know about this?”

“Yeah. He’s on his way back with the rest of the cell. Should be here anytime. We met with him back in Russia when we were letting Giles know how things went with the Scourge, so I’m sure it’s common knowledge by now with all the cells that were there that I’m retiring…” 

“No… I mean, does he know that you… That…”

Spike snorted grimly. “He knows. Was there. Little twat.”

That aside earned him another startled look.

“Some water under that bridge,” Buffy informed her quietly. “Anyway, Andrew should be able to de-Buffify you pretty easily, and you can go back to being Mia Girardi.”

Mia shivered a little. “It is very strange. I haven’t been myself for a very long time now.” She looked away, toward the curtained windows leading out onto the streets. “Giacomo will be regretful. Amazed that any woman would wish to say _ciao_ to him…”

Spike leaned forward to hold up one finger, clearly astonished. “Excuse me? _Giacomo?”_

Mia favored them with a look that was almost coquettish; an odd expression, by the way, to see on one’s own features. “I could hardly spend this much time in the man’s company and continue to call him ‘the Immortal’, could I? Yes, Giacomo. At least, this is the name he has asked me to use for him.”

Spike subsided back onto the cushions of the sofa, obviously floored. 

Buffy found herself frowning, though. “Will _you_ be sorry? I’d hate to think that my decision is going to mess up your life, Mia. I mean, if you’re really deep into this relationship…”

Mia sighed a little wistfully. “It is not a relationship between myself and this man, nor is it between a woman and any real person. I am playing a part and always was; and so is Giacomo. He is playing the role of ‘the Immortal’. And this? It becomes tiring, after a while; both for me to be this other person, and for me to know that he does the same. I would wish to know who he truly is, but he will never show me that man, if he even remembers anymore beneath the acting. And…” She shrugged a little, again, with faint undertones of regret. “Nothing that he does with me is for me. It is a thing he has done a thousand times with a thousand women over the ages. It is all wondrous the first time. The first five times. But after the first ten, the first fifteen, you begin to realize… you are no more special than any other. It is then you realize, you never will be. So… it is fun. It is stimulating. But it is no longer yours, _si?”_

Buffy dug an elbow pointedly into Spike’s side as she leaned back, nodding. “So… you’re alright with ending it? It won’t wreck your life or anything?”

Mia shrugged one shoulder. “It will be a graceful way to extricate myself. I will vanish. Andrew will make me Mia Girardi once more; a woman unremarkable to _L’immortale_ , and I will be able to concentrate once more on bettering my skills on this side of the sheets, and which are not dancing.” A faint blush once more touched her cheeks. “Not to say that I did not know what was to be involved when I took on the assignment. I was not opposed. It was an opportunity to catch the notice of a legendary lover, and to hold it. But… now I have had that experience, and I am pleased that I should move on from it to other ones.”

It was a relief to hear. “Alright. So, then, the other thing we needed to talk to you about was, we need to bring a big vehicle up front before tomorrow night. We’re gonna be taking the rest of Dawn’s things along with whatever I have left here. We have a ship set up to take us out of the port tomorrow night. We’ll be heading back to the US, and then after that…”

Buffy’s words were interrupted by a loud knock on the door.

**TBC…  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
** Sorry again. That's how it broke down. We'll have the showdown with the Immortal next time. It's a fun one. Hehe.  
  
(Quote by Lucille Ball)


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright. Something pretty damned important happens in this chapter, so here you go. 
> 
> Onward with L'Immortale!!!!
> 
> (oh... just as a side-note, anyone who wants to critique my Italian, please do, as I was looking up Italian endearments on Google, and we know what a death-trap that can be.)

Alarm swarmed across a face far too like Buffy’s own for comfort. Mia shot to her feet. “He is here! How will we explain you?”

Spike was on his feet as well, the bond taut as a guitar string. “Bloody hell.”

“Calm down, Spike. Mia, we’ll think of something.”

“Perhaps you should hide in the bedroom, and I will escort him quickly away…”

“You’re not even done with your makeup. And besides, he knows Spike too.”

“Yeah, we go way back.” Spike had his fists doubled at his sides. 

Mia looked confused. “Why can’t he also…”

Buffy exhaled, long and decisively. “Because this needs to happen, I think, to make the break clean.” She glanced over at her guy, clearly one giant ball of mess. /Alright, let’s do this./ Spike needed it, anyway. “Listen, Mia. I’m your twin sister, alright? I came to visit…”

_“Bellissima_ , I await your scrumptious form! Come out and show yourself to me, and together we will paint the town…”

Wow, he really sounded like a prize. Buffy wasn’t sure he’d ever heard, in two short sentences, a guy who sounded more full of himself, and she hadn’t even seen the dude yet. “Go ahead, Mia. Let him in. Let’s get this over with.” 

Mia looked like she’d rather do anything else right now. _“Mio Dio…”_ But she was used to following orders. She strode to the exit, turned the knob. Buffy took hold of Spike’s hand to still his convulsive jittering. He was driving her nuts.

_“Tesora,_ you are not ready to leave! What is…”  
  
The man who stepped into the apartment was not at all what Buffy expected. Only about a finger taller than Spike, with longish, shiny, mid-brown hair cut sort of chin-length, he had dark eyes kind of like Angel’s but without the haunted edges, and an expression stuffed full of self-assurance. No retiring airs or shyness in this one, not a line one on his perfectly-tanned face, every tooth in exact alignment, a roguish smile in place on some serious pillow-lips that… God, was he wearing lip-gloss or something? An extremely straight, aquiline nose with almost too-dainty nostrils… Even a cleft chin and a dimple on one cheek. Yes, he was exceedingly good-looking; but he had that… thing about him. That smug thing that said he knew it and wielded it ferociously, like a weapon he expected never to miss.

He kind of reminded her of Dracula. Ugh.

“I apologize, Giacomo. I was taken by surprise by an unexpected visit from my sister…” Mia gestured toward Buffy, sounding breathless and startlingly American. Almost Buffy-like, if way too formal; like a Buffy who’d gone to finishing-school or something. It was bizarre.

The Immortal’s gaze slid away from Mia in the direction indicated. Caught on Buffy and Spike, further into the room. At which point he jerked theatrically, eyes widening in unstudied shock _. “Mio Dio, tesora,_ you did not tell me you had a twin! What is _your_ name, _Bellissima?”_

Buffy’s lips twitched. “Anne.”

Spike huffed grimly and sought in his pocket for a cigarette, a movement which called the other man’s attention to him. Dark eyes widened. “William the Bloody, is it? Truly? Again?” And the Immortal’s too-full lips curved up into a cupid’s bow of a smile, just this side of a sneer. “What brings you back to Rome, my friend?”

“I go where this one goes,” Spike answered around his cigarette, and lit up for all the world as if he were at Willy’s and this was a relaxed and casual meeting of minds. Not so much from this close, though. Buffy could feel his insides shaking from here. 

“Oh?” Dark eyes turned back to Buffy’s, now in a far more interested assessment. As the full weight of his regard landed on her, she felt something percolate through her being; like gravity pressing against her mind, prickling on her skin. Something… invasive. Slick and sensual and persuasive and irritatingly insistent.

And then it was as if something else rebelled; shoved the weight away. Shoved off the prickles. Insulated her. She felt Spike’s body brush hers from behind, smelled his scent, familiar as breathing. Felt him shift as he realized that something had happened; as he watched her, trying to figure it out. /It’s the bond/ she realized distantly, feeling a little bit in a haze. /He has some kind of weird ability. Spike was right. He’s… something. Has some kind of sex-chemistry-thing, but it’s sliding off of me because of the blood-bond./ 

She was never more grateful for that sharing than in this moment. And she would let the both of them know it, right now; that she was unaffected. 

Keeping her eyes focused firm and hard on the Immortal’s, she lifted a brow, tilted her chin back just a little… and crossed her arms. And felt Spike straighten at her side and a hair behind her, triumph rolling through their linkage as he recognized, in that instant, that she had thrown off some kind of expected response.

And watched the Immortal recoil slightly, shock painted across his fine features. “You… come to visit your sister, is it? The famous Slayer?” He sounded shaken. “I had heard she had a sister, but not a twin…”

“I’m a best-kept-secret,” Buffy responded innocently. “It’s always a little awkward letting people know you have two Slayers in the family.” Might as well get some fun in while she played with the situation. Maybe even start a little mythology. “Makes it a lot easier to take care of business when you can switch places at any given moment, handle two problem-spots at once halfway across the world…”

The stunned creature jerked again, clearly floored now. “You are also a Slayer?”

“Oh, yeah. That whole ‘one girl in all the world’ thing? It never accounted for identical twins. The Calling apparently considered us the same flesh.” She waved a blasé hand. Might as well make it sound good. “Sharing the slaying’s like sharing outfits for us. We’re both Buffy at any given moment…” Mia was gaping at her now, an expression the Immortal luckily could not see, since he was currently staring at Buffy as if she were a ghost. It was worth it though, to spin this moonshine. And an interesting idea. No doubt the Powers would never have let it happen, but what if it ever had? Would it have panned out that way? Two for the price of one?

What a thought. And how fun would that have been? The world with two Buffies, instead of getting her and Faith, always trying to kill each other because she had always looked at her sister-Slayer as evidence of her failure with Angel. Someone she couldn’t help but love, instead, and someone to help her share the load. Her exact equal rather than a competitor. 

/The other side would’ve been in a world of hurt. Glory…/

Sure would’ve scared all the douches who’d thought to turn Sunnydale into party-central after she’d died, if a twin had just marched right in and taken up where she’d left off. /Really it was just a robot, but you don’t have to know that, do you, ‘Giacomo’?/

She didn’t have to wonder what Spike was making of all this. She could feel him behind her, trembling with barely-restrained laughter over her little flight of fancy. 

“Two Slayers,” the Immortal murmured, and he seemed to be recovering his stride, now. “Both involved in the most famous events in recent occult memory. Defenders of the most active hellmouth on Earth…” He tilted his head to eye Buffy with significant interest… and it should be noted, Buffy realized, that he hadn’t paid a whit of attention to Mia since he’d laid eyes on her double. “You know, I have always had a particular… fondness for identical twins. And they for me.”

Spike’s silent laughter morphed into an almost-inaudible growl. Not that Buffy could really blame him. /Oh wow. Just, really? _Wow_./ Was this guy for real? “No thanks. Not that you’d have a chance either way, since I think my sister here was about to tell you something you might not want to hear.”

The Immortal seemed stunned by her flat lack of interest, but tore his eyes from her to return his gaze for the first time to Mia, as if he had just then remembered that she was even there. _“Diletta_ , what is it you wished to tell me?”

His recent and complete dissing of her over the last few minutes had clearly lent her steam. Mia’s expression was an easy read, being as it was written on Buffy’s own familiar features. Determined irritation. “Giacomo, I think it’s time we end our relationship.”

It was a night for harsh shocks for the Immortal. _“Bellissima_ , you _wound_ me! Why would you say this to me? Have we not enjoyed one another? 

His dramaticisms only firmed up the girl’s resolve. “We have. But it’s time for us to end. I have other responsibilities, and you have other conquests to make. Thank you for a lovely time, but…”

The handsome face darkened. “What has your sister said to you to convince you to end this glorious love affair…”

“Oh, be honest, Giacomo!” Mia burst out, clearly very abruptly at the end of her rope. “You don’t love me and I don’t love you. We’ve enjoyed each other; me as much as I can enjoy a man who does with me what he does with every woman he’s with, and you as much as you enjoy every woman you have. It’s been fun. But you don’t love anyone; not really, and definitely not as much by far as you love yourself.”

The Immortal stood extremely still for a dangling moment, stymied… and then, with a slow, genial tilt of his head, accepted the finality of things. “I have enjoyed you, _Bellissima_. I wish you well.” Then, without ceremony, he turned away from her to face the real Buffy. “Surely, though, your sister has told you that the experience was worth it…” He appeared to be ignoring Spike’s existence entirely, a practice that had her guy tense as a cat on a tightrope over a bathtub. 

Buffy ended both their suspense with a snort of amusement. “Oh, you couldn’t handle me, Giacomo,” she told Mr. Don Juan plainly, and folded her fingers very firmly in Spike’s. “I need a little more monster in my man than you ever dreamed of being; whatever you are. And besides…” She smiled darkly. “My interests are very… personalized. Spike fulfills my every need, wish, whim, and desire very nicely, and then some. I’m deeply satisfied and not the slightest bit interested in hitting the sheets with a lover my sister assures me uses the same ten moves repeatedly with every woman since Eve.”

She was vaguely aware, somewhere out of her periphery, that Mia was blushing like crazy and probably whispering to herself in Italian about the TMI, and okay, maybe she hadn’t had to make it sound quite so much like she was the kink queen or something instead of just that she had a… /Well, an orientation, I guess. I’m vampsexual. About time I admitted it./ Still, she had made it sound like all they did was chain each other up to the rafters instead of it being that she just really, really loved Spike… but she also really, really didn’t like this smug, smarmy Immortal jerk. He was just too much. And besides… Spike had needed that. Needed the victory. 

Her response had done the trick, though. Spike was standing next to her now, and she could swear he had grown about an inch taller, the way he was holding himself. She could feel the vibration in him; some vast energy only thinly held in check as he stood there, her hand clasped very firmly in his. 

The Immortal remained extraordinarily still for what seemed like a very long time, his glare taking in both herself and Spike, features suffused in red… and then one finger slowly rose to point at Buffy. “No woman says no to me…”

“I just did.”

Dark eyes swiveled up to Spike’s, accusing. “You did not have this power before, with your vampire woman. You have cast a spell on this Slayer. It is the only answer.”

Spike slipped his cigarette out of his mouth to smirk. “No. Hate to break it to you, mate, since you might not know it… but you don’t need a sodding spell when it comes to love. Woman in love will actually tell a prat like you to sod off. Difference between Dru and the Slayer here is, Dru never really loved me. Not like that, so she was fair game. This one, though… Different story altogether, somehow.”

Buffy shot him a glare for the ‘somehow’. “Drusilla was just holding him in custody for me till they got to my decade and I could pick him up at the hellmouth baggage claim.”

To her surprise, instead of considering her fanciful comment romantic, Spike swiveled to level her with a startled glare. “Oi! You calling me baggage, pet?”

“No. Wait, is that some kind of British insult? Because, no. But if it isn’t, then… it’s a trick question?”

“Soddin’ Americans… First you’re orderin’ my drinks for me, then you’re callin’ me baggage. Next week I for sure will have that bleedin’ collar, and somehow you’ll have me thinkin’ it was all my idea…”

Buffy felt the grin split her lips. “Seriously. Were we gonna talk about that? Because I’m down.” More than, actually, as the visual of him wearing something nice and black and leather with a few metal studs on it situated just so on that hot, tight, pale neck while his body strained against hers on a bed somewhere, wrists bound, had her feeling more than a little… 

Well. Warm in places. /And okay, maybe I am a little kinky./ 

Spike’s nostrils flared as he took note. And his eyes sparked as his (mock? Real?) irritation subsided abruptly into very genuine interest.

From over by the door, Mia made a choked sound, dragging their eyes away from one another. Next to Mia, the Immortal’s face had shut down completely. “I will take my leave.” With a short bow that hid levels of disgust rivaled maybe only by something Giles or Xander could have come up with, he turned away from them, bowed a little deeper over Mia’s hand. “I was proud to have known the sister I did. Farewell, _Bellissima_. If you ever change your mind…”

“You will be the first to know,” she murmured back.

_“Ciao.”_ And he was gone, striding away out of the apartment.

Mia closed the door behind him with a _thump_ and leaned against it, breathing hard and staring pretty much everywhere but them. Buffy only caught a quick glimpse of her expression, though, before she was whirled in the air by an ecstatic Spike on an adrenaline high, holding her under her arms like she was a doll and swinging her in circles. “Buffy, Buffy, Buffy,” he chanted, and then dragged her unceremoniously down to his mouth, wrapped his arms around her, and began the process of kissing her within an inch of her life. At which point she maybe could be forgiven for taking a page out of the Immortal’s book and kind of forgetting for a second that Mia was even there. She was, after all, being devoured by a cool, intensely skilled and insanely ravenous mouth, and, well… She just hoped he was keeping the cigarette pointed somewhere away from her as she hung on for the ride and, grinning at his excitement, gave back as good as she got. Might as well abandon herself to the moment of celebration, after all. 

The problem with all that was… Spike was clearly on an emotional high that begged a moment or fifteen alone. Want raged through his hands to thunder through her blood, and his fingers, flexing on the small of her back and worming under her shirt to stroke skin, were holding back only out of some vague remaining awareness of where they were, and that there was another heartbeat in the room, and… Well. They should probably go somewhere or something. A park, or a nice public area. Bit of statuary facing the Tiber, or some pillar or something. Find a tree. They were good with trees…

“I must call Andrew. Find out how soon he will be back, so that he can return me to my own face…” Mia’s voice was shaken—and more than a little embarrassed-sounding—as she murmured the words. Then came the almost-inaudible _boops_ of a phone being dialed, the sounds of footsteps receding as she paced away toward the hall that led to the bedrooms. 

Concentration briefly broken, Spike shuddered from Buffy’s mouth to drop his face into her neck. Buried his mouth and nose against his bite there, body rocking shamelessly against hers. “Fuck,” he ground out hoarsely.

The rhythmic, almost subliminal motion of his hips was doing exactly nothing to help Buffy with her self-control. “I need to call Dawn,” she managed, equally breathless. “Check in. Then we should probably get out of here…”

“Mmm…” His tongue was out, laving the scar helplessly as his demon drove him to desperate reminder of his claim, and dammit, they needed to get _out_ of here. 

“You’re not helping,” she snapped, and fought with her back pocket to prize the phone out from tight jean material. 

A cool hand very helpfully slid down to fondle her ass, clutching, pulling her hard against his now positively rutting erection before it slid the phone out and plopped it into her hand. /Very tricky, Mister. Nice way to avoid a reprimand. ‘Hey, look at me, the very much helpful demon, don’t beat me up for copping a feel, look at me being helpful! Or, you know, beat me up, but only in the nice foreplay way…’/

Instigator. And also, where the hell had the cigarette gone? He must have pinched it out or something, probably burned himself doing it, and right now it was tough to even be mad about it, because those hands were just really busy on her. Dangerously wandering as they returned to their task of keeping her as splayed against him as he could possibly manage without there being actual sex right now; and was he trying to incur Slayer wrath? Because this really wouldn’t be the first time. 

From somewhere at a distance she vaguely heard Mia’s voice drifting down the hall. Made sense of the words, ish. “…Arrived just a half-hour ago. No. She said she’s leaving us, so I must bid farewell to _L’Immortale,_ and you would give me back my own face when you returned… _Si_ , the vampire is with her…” 

“The vampire is gonna be _in_ her any second if we don’t get the bloody hell out of here,” Spike threatened. “On the couch or on the sodding floor. Send the bloody text and let’s be off; for Christ’s _sake_ , Buffy.”

Buffy sought for something resembling tolerant amusement for her reply, when really all her body wanted to go for was violent agreement, coupled with ‘throw him on said floor, stat’. “The vampire managed to keep a handle on himself for a whole year.” She knew the gift of her trust always leveled him; and why. Why she never considered it playing with fire anymore, despite the fact he no longer trusted himself; and why he thought they _always_ would be. _“Twice_ if I remember right, so I think a few more minutes…”

The phone was promptly smushed in between them as his arms ratcheted tight around her, crushing her against him; and he vamped, hard up against her neck. “Buffy…” he warned, and he was shaking now, need throbbing through the link between them, “the vampire wasn’t mated to you then, and that first year the vampire hadn’t even had you yet, so he didn’t know what he was missing. And the second year he had a whole hell of a lot of guilt holding him back. Right now the vampire is about one breath shy of dropping to his knees right here and now to worship that gorgeous cunny of yours till you’re begging me for a bite, and to hell with that other bitch in the flat, to hell with anything…”

He knew exactly what he was doing was the thing. He knew she was an exhibitionist, knew that fucking him in front of another Slayer would be the ultimate in taboo acts. Would smell her arousal in response to the thought, the flooding of adrenaline, hear the thundering of her heart in her chest and the pounding of her blood in her veins making her lightheaded at the very suggestion. None of which was very conducive to convincing him she was trying to hold back, because really? They both knew she was _this_ close to dragging him back against the nearest wall to proceed with all suggested activities. Damn her traitorous body. “We need to…”

Mia’s reentry to the main room was like a shock of cold water. “I have spoken to Andrew. He wishes me to go to the cell’s safehouse until he returns and can give me back my own face, in case _L’Immortale_ tries again to contact me in between the time in which you are here and he arrives. He expects to be back tomorrow night or perhaps Thursday morning with the rest of the cell…” Her borrowed eyes rose to meet theirs, shied away. “My absence will allow you to collect all which you need from this place and depart without interference; so that no one will mark the presence of two women who look so very similar.”

“Oh,” Buffy husked faintly. She truly hadn’t thought of that complication. Not that she had been thinking all that much in the last few moments. “Right. That… makes sense.”

“I have packed a small bag. Mia tilted her head slightly. “It was good to see you again, if briefly, Buffy. I am sorry that you are leaving us.” Her eyes flickered to Spike and away again. “Be well.” And, hefting the small duffel Buffy hadn’t noticed until just that moment, she turned and, without another word, headed for the door.

It closed behind her with a quiet thump, leaving the familiar room in complete silence. One which Spike broke, finally, with a grunt. “Didn’t expect a Slayer to treat a vamp like a person, you know, ‘Nice to meet you as well, vampire who’s shaggin’ my ex-boss an’ all’. Bein’ as how I’m the reason you’re leavin’, she probably wanted to deck me. Given that, have to admit, she seemed a bit subdued, yeah?”

Buffy didn’t really feel like discussing Mia’s moods at the moment. She just grabbed his lapels and dragged him toward the hall. “Sniff around. Tell me which room she was using.”

Spike blinked at her, clearly thrown. “Uh, this small one off to the side smells of Andrew… and maybe a bit of Dawn? Old smells, like.” 

“Then she was using mine. Which one would you rather be in when we tear up the sheets?”

That earned her a startled blue look; one which turned swiftly practical. “She smells enough like you for it to make no real difference. The one was yours.”

She tugged him to her right; to the doorway behind the living room; into familiar smells (old plaster covered with aging paint, thick, heavy curtains, the nighttime scents from the street outside), familiar décor. Mia hadn’t changed much of anything. Added a few personalized items; a family photo here—three dark-haired persons of clear Italian heritage in an ornate golden-y frame—a locket dangling from the lamp there, but otherwise, it was the same old room. Sans, of course, the photos Buffy had once had decorating the edges of the mirror, and a different set of makeup-items gracing the vanity. 

She shoved Spike unceremoniously to the slightly-rumpled but made bed—even the comforter was one she’d left behind—and headed for the curtains, since they faced east. Tugged them closed, just in case some people got caught up in the festivities and fell asleep. 

Spike watched her in clear amazement from where he lay on his back, propped on his elbows. “Thought you were gonna text Bit.”

“Later.” Stalking toward her quarry, she tossed the phone onto the nearest nightstand, where it _thunked_ lightly to rest under the deco lampshade and gleamed fitfully in the reflected lights from the city outside. And pounced. “You’re bad,” she told him, arched over his body and with a hand planted on either side of his face.

That earned her a smirk. “The baddest, baby.”

She rolled her eyes at him… an expression which quickly lost traction when he raised a knee and caught her in a rough massage in places that really wanted pressure. Her mouth dropped open of its own accord, and she gasped soundlessly at him. “That’s… cheating,” she managed after some seconds.

“Didn’t know there were rules, luv.” And, when her eyes opened on him again, _“Qui bellum sine arma sunt fortissimi.”_ And a hand lifted to cup her cheek, stilling her body against him.

A shudder ran through her that had nothing to do with physical sensation. “Alright, what does that one mean?”

“Those who battle without armor are bravest,” he told her softly, and pulled her down, hard, to meet his lips.

The kiss went on for a long moment; till Buffy, impatient, grabbed his lapels once more and yanked him hard up into her face. “I want you to bite me tonight.”

A growl rippled out of Spike’s throat, and he vamped again, hard and fast. She could swear she could _hear_ his erection grow another two sizes, like the Grinch’s heart. His jeans were going to pop any minute. “I think we can manage that, luv,” he told her easily, grinning around his fangs in the low light from under the curtain edges. 

Returning the grin, Buffy leaned in close to carefully lick one gleaming incisor. “It was this that did it,” she informed him with a smirk. “I could feel him pulling at me. Your bond kept me safe. Whatever he was doing just… slid right off of me.”

Spike’s scarred brow lifted with interest. “Oh, yeah? Pity.”

“Yeah, huh?” Lowering her forehead to his bumpies, she nudged him back to the bed, slid her hands down to drag the edges of the duster out from under her thighs. “I kind of want to know what he is, now, actually. If he’s so used to it working that he was shocked I said no, he’s got to be…”

Lowering his knee, Spike obligingly lifted up to help shove the leather away. “If he’s so foursquare against bleedin’ magicks, then my money’s on incubus,” he muttered grimly. “Bet the bastard’s got an internal thing; part of his nature, yeah? Thinks using anything so bumbling as a love spell would be amateurish; since he obviously doesn’t need it.”

Now working methodically at the way-too-many-buttons of his stupid shirt, Buffy pursed her lips, her mind picking up some hazy reference from the distant past. The faintest memory of a woodcut; something about a long-haired girl perched on a man’s chest in bed, sucking out his soul or something. “Isn’t there a… I dunno, a girl-version of the incubus?”

“Succubus, yeah,” Spike answered with a faint smirk as he watched her progress. “Though, to be fair, that’s mostly interpretation. Really, gender doesn’t matter so much as what they do. Can have female Incubi and male Succubi. What matters is the actions they take. An’ any road, haven’t seen or heard about any succubi around in ages; nor yet incubi, ‘less you count this prat. Maybe the rotters ‘ve all gone extinct, or gone back to whatever hell they came from…”

“Good,” Buffy pronounced firmly, having gotten enough of the button-down open to get her hands on his sexy chest. Oh, thank God; he wasn’t wearing a tee underneath today. It would save time. “Since I hate to think of you under the influence.” She lowered her mouth to nip lightly at his adam’s apple, making him hiss. “It felt super weird, but really, really strong. And if I ever had to watch you, you know, fall for it in front of me I’d be really, really upset.” Lifting away, she found herself digging her nails lightly into his chest. “I’d have to kill me some succubus. Or incubus, I guess, though…”

Spike’s eyes had taken on an odd cast. “You think I’d fall for that?”

Buffy exhaled impatiently, forced herself, with some effort, to retract her claws. “I’d like to think _I_ wouldn’t have, but you don’t know how strong it was. There might’ve been, I dunno… pheromones involved or something.” Time to admit what was bothering her. “The bond gave me an edge, but let’s be real. You have _me_ claimed, not the other way around, so it’s not like…”

“You already own me,” Spike answered, and his voice was quiet enough that it startled her; an almost formless sound murmuring up from the pale glow of his body in the night. The low tones seemed to drift through the semi-darkness to touch her ears. Shimmered there, like his own glowing promise in the night. “Always have.” Weirdly, though, there was a note like he was trying to… maybe convince himself? 

Maybe he thought that if he said it out loud enough times it would make it true. That it would have been enough, if it was him, and damn. Just the thought of it going the other way had her hackles rising, jealousy choking in her throat; and no wonder he’d been in such a lather back there, because if it had been _him_ under some succubus-spell thing she would have been throwing down like _nobody’s_ business.

The duster was ripped away from his arms to double as comforter-protection—not the first time it had acted as a prophylactic for some other surface, really, and came out smelling like sex—and she was scrabbling at the last few buttons to tear open the wide-collared, wine-red overshirt. Spread her fingers wide over the fine, tight muscles of his torso, taut under her touch. Brushed the scars sprayed in a diagonal across his abdomen, wincing as she touched them one by one, mostly by feel in the gloaming, the lamplight shining in from the hall. They hadn’t had the chance to really touch each other since he’d been shot. Not really; not like this. Just groping in the dark for reassurance after a battle, and definitely not since the horrible things had come back out. 

_God_.

A hand caught her wrist, clamping tight around the bones there, so that her circulation spasmed slightly and the pumping of her blood thundered between them. She met his eyes, shaking a little, saw the denial there. “I’ll not take it back, pet. Not for anything.”

/Damn you./ Shaking his grip loose from her wrist, she tore her own shirt off over her head, reached back for her bra. Felt his hands slide behind her to help, unhooking it with the ease of long practice. Dropped it aside with a tiny flick so that it joined her shirt over the edge of the bed; and then she was lying along his body, to warm his cool length with her heat as she lowered her face to the spot on his neck where the last bullet had exited him. She’d tend to the other one—the other really bad one—later. But this one…

His siring mark, from Drusilla. A wrecked thing now, virtually erased and looking nothing like a bite. Just a mangled exit wound on the left side of his neck, made up of ravaged flesh and newly-healed scar-tissue. Like a part of his identity had been torn from him. And how must that feel, both physically, for a vampire, and emotionally? 

Lowering her mouth to the spot, she moved instinctively to tongue the scar, as gently as she could manage. Sucked, very, very lightly. And was stunned at his overwhelming response. 

He bucked beneath her, hard. Made a sound like she was tearing his undead heart out by the roots. And his hips started to go like she was jerking him off, and, just… Wow.

She had hardly ever done this sort of thing with him. Nothing that looked anything like real biting or sucking anywhere near the places vamps liked to go. Shoulder, yes. Neck, no. It just seemed to be too much like… a mockery, or playing games, or… But if she’d known… 

She went a little harder, curious. And now he was moaning her name, shaking all over, and holy crap, she was pretty sure he was going to come all over himself, in his _jeans_ , in a second, if she didn’t stop soon, and was it just that it was still super-sensitive from the recently-healed thing, or…

“Buffy, oh Christ, oh fuck, oh _God_ …”

Okay, he had never said _that_ in bed.

She pulled off to watch him, feeling… weirdly merciful. Ran her hand down to still his hips with a gentling hand. “I didn’t know that was… such a thing,” she whispered.

He was breathing hard through his nose and really just not talking, and oh wow, he had seriously been on the edge. Just from _that_. Talk about something to play with! “Is it just because… of the bullet, or is it…”

His eyes were closed, every line of his body gone abruptly uncertain. And then, to her surprise, he rolled up, wrapped his arms around her, buried his face in the nook between her neck and shoulder. “Been rootless for a bit,” he muttered into her naked collarbone, voice hoarse. “Not really connected to anyone. You, yeah, but not… by blood. Not really. Offered, but… It’s not been taken up, and… Bein’ disowned? For a vamp, that’s… a hard thing. Got the connection, yeah, but it’s tenuous, and it was always a bit mad. Without her about all the time it’s gonna get muddled. Wrong-footed. ‘Specially after I denied her, said I’d do her in for you. She orphaned me after that. Right of her to do it, but…” A shuddering breath. “Got Peaches, but it’s once removed and a mess an’ I don’t want it. Never did, even if it tugs at me. Only want you, but that’s not…” He trailed of for a second, his voice aching so much that she could feel the longing of it in her blood.

/Oh God… he’s been feeling like I did, back there for those few minutes after we came back from the time-loop. All this time, he’s felt like that. Bound to everyone else but me, with Angel and Drusilla pulling at him, even when we’re together./ The thought of him being forever racked by that kind of multipartite pull, dragging him apart horrified her, ripped at her heart. She knew what that felt like; and God, she wanted to fix it for him. Wished like hell she could. 

She sure the hell never wanted his crazypants sire to be able to tug at him, whenever it was they ran into her again. Which they would, for sure, because it was going to happen. It just was, and they both knew it. And it was obvious that Angel could push him around with just the tones of his voice, had relinquished nothing of his blood-edge over Spike, and it drove Buffy nuts the way their dynamic worked. She wished to god she could fix that, take it away, hated every second of it. Probably nowhere near as much as Spike did, but…

A tentative note touched the edges of her guy’s voice. “What we have is incredible and I’m glad of it, Buffy. Even if it’s not the same, you’ll always be the center of my universe; with or without. Just knowing you’ve decided to choose me gives me an anchor in the world; but… it’s hard sometimes to feel alone in that particular way. The blood way.” 

/Wait. Alone?/ She worked her way through that last, trying to parse what he was telling her. She would have thought it would be the other way. Too populated in there, or… But maybe it worked differently for vamps. 

She remembered, of course, what he had said to her back in Hell-A, that first time. That Drusilla had claimed him, but he had never gotten to claim her. That was why Buffy’s having allowed him to do so had been such a gift for him, but it sounded like in a way, he was still missing the opposite function; like an open-ended loop of some kind. Which was weird, because the bond felt pretty closed and right from Buffy’s perspective. But then… wouldn’t it?

She slumped internally as she came up once more against the same immovable wall. /Not that I can do anything about it, since I’m not a vamp. I can’t… claim _him_ , can I? No matter how many times he’s said he’s mine while he’s bleeding, I can’t…/

Something about her silence seemed to make him uncertain. “Maybe it’s a bit redundant for you to claim me in return. God knows you already own me, Buffy; balls to bone.” His voice turned hesitant; more tentative than she had possibly ever heard it in all their years together. “But if you ever wanted to… Christ; I’m all bloody yours.”

Buffy felt like she was whirling down some kind of deep, spiraling ride, spinning faster and faster toward some insane, unforeseen event-horizon. It had always bothered her on some obscure and unarticulated level that Spike had this… _thing_ over her that she couldn’t replicate. Not a power, per se, since he had never even remotely attempted to use it in that way… but the fact of the matter was, if he ever wanted to, he _could_. If she didn’t trust him utterly by this point, she would never have permitted the intimacy for exactly that reason. So it had stood, for half a year, and she had told herself it was fine; because she had always known the truth. That he had given himself utterly to her from the start; that when it came to power differentials, she had it all, emotionally-speaking. Had told herself that it therefore didn’t matter in the slightest that he could do a thing to and for her that she could never do for him. 

But now he was saying… she actually _could?_ Could she take what he had given to her and give it back? “Are you saying… that I _can?”_

His face rose from her shoulder, very, very slowly. She was not at all surprised, given the quality of his voice, to see sapphire eyes looking at her now and not amber ones. Amazement colored their azure depths as he stared at her in clear shock. “Thought you knew. Thought… you were holdin’ back a bit. Didn’t want it, or…” A faint suggestion of a pale shrug in the lamplight. “Or that maybe you were scared of it comin’ too close to the other.” Something husky entered his voice. “It wouldn’t. You have to be on the edge of death for it to… you know. Be a siring. Otherwise it’s just a mutual claim.” He looked away, down at his hands, now picking irresolutely at some seam of the duster beneath him. He was lying propped up a little on his elbow now, facing her; half-clothed and naked as she had ever seen him. “Not many do it. Not even vamps, since it would break up the nest’s bonds, and…” A little, rueful head-shake. “I couldn’t honestly imagine a sire trustin’ their childer with somethin’ like that. With havin’ that much power over ‘em; even one in a long-term relationship, so usually it’s one-sided if that. Hell, usually you only bite each other outside of sex, not during, so there’s no chance the childe can claim the sire. Just mutual feeds, otherwise, and swearin’ fealty an’ the like. Different energy to the blood. But…”

He was rambling. Trying incredibly hard not to sound hopeful. She had heard him like this before, seen him like this before; so terrified she was going to deny him something he desperately wanted if he dared to open up and let her see him vulnerable, and dammit, she had had no effing clue that it was even a thing that could _happen!_ “How… I… How does that even work? I mean, I thought it was… That it had to be…” She floundered, as she always did when caught unawares and without a script; the inarticulate Buffy of old, completely at a loss. “I mean, I’m not even _equipped_. I mean, not just with the…” She waved her hand over her face, fully aware that he could see like a cat in low light. “But also, you know, the blood and the…” 

Spike didn’t seem to mind her descent back to ineloquent-Buffy. He just stared at her as if she had changed shape or turned colors or morphed into some kind of vision of salvation. “You actually… want me like that?”

It called a complete halt to all her confusion about logistics. Here she was wondering about how things worked, and he was just floored that she would even want to… well. _Claim_ him to that degree. Bind them any tighter together, and, /Oh my God, you are seriously still just like a lost puppy sometimes, aren’t you?/ Her wounded, stray dog she’d kicked around for years but who still hung around at her ankles loving her and taking scraps outside her door, and who remained absolutely amazed that he got to sleep at her feet when she had finally accepted him—and by extension, herself—enough to let him into her heart and home. Finally admitted that she liked puppies who were actually more like half-tamed jaguars in bed, or something. Whatever. Each fresh evidence that he had a home now, was wanted and loved, always blindsided him as a miraculous, unforeseen thing he couldn’t quite credit as real. “Spike. I want all of you. I just didn’t know it was… possible. For a non-vamp. I thought this one-sided thing was all we _could_ have.”

His eyes fell closed, and he shivered against her. “Bloody Christ, Buffy… I’m sorry. It never occurred to me to tell you. Sodding fuck. I forget sometimes what you do and don’t know.”

/Well, I spent enough years making you think you should be ashamed of what you are around me. That you shouldn’t even talk about it, really, or I’d just make you feel like garbage. I guess I can’t expect you to switch gears immediately./ “How?” she asked him softly. “And… what should we expect?”

He was breathing hard now, in that way that only happened when he was seriously emotionally losing it. His eyes were closed again, cheekbones straining. Neck too. He looked like he was being run through some kind of crazy torture device. “I… Hell. The same way I do it with you, Love. You’d get me on the edge and then bite me. Hard enough to draw blood... and claim me. I accept. That’s all of it.”

/Tell him he’s mine. Believe it, _know_ it./ “And the rest?”

“Ah… Sodding hell.” His eyes rose to meet hers, bright and frank in the low light; like lasers. “I’ll want to do whatever the bloody hell you want me to do. As if I don’t already. Never want anyone else. Not that I ever have; not really. Probably wouldn’t even be able to get it up for anyone else, after. And I dunno about the rest, but I’d imagine… And mind, this is just guessin’, since it’s not like I’ve done it before, nor yet talked to anyone who has; but I’d imagine based on how it is already on my side, we might even start feelin’ more of each other’s sensations and the like, rather than just the emotions and the lot.” He tried for a hint of his old innuendo, if only in an attempt to rally himself. “Which might be a bit of alright in bed…”

/Well, now./ That could be… interesting. She already got flashes of his sensations here and there when he was in dire straits, or if they were very near to each other. Especially when they were touching. But to have it be stronger…

/Let’s be real./ The idea of knowing what his orgasm actually _felt_ like sounded like a nice perk… and the whole being able to feel exactly how close someone was to getting off could add a whole other dimension to lovemaking. 

Of course, there was the added ‘feeling a whole other set of sensations could really push things over the edge a lot faster for everyone concerned’ part of things, and probably sex wouldn’t last nearly as long for a while, but there were pros and cons to everything. And they’d eventually get used to it, right, and build up some stamina?

“Problem being, if that’s how it comes about, we would probably also feel each other’s pain, not just vaguely knowin’ when one of us was in trouble or needs the other.”

“Oh. Right. Damn.” There was that for a con, too. More pain, more pleasure. Two sides of the coin. “I guess… everything has a toll.” /Like…/ He was kind of insane, wasn’t he? Wanting this? “Are you sure you…”

“Yes.” His answer was immediate. 

He was so crazed. “But you said…”

“I have no idea. Just guessin’, Buffy. But it’s _you.”_ His eyes on her blazed with intensity. “You, and no one else, ever again, to hold me.” A tremor ran through him, naked longing written on his face. The need to utterly _belong_ to her. “Christ, you don’t know how I want it.”

He was nuts. And amazing. It almost sounded too intense, to her, the way it worked from his end… and would she feel _that_ , too? What he felt? /Everything has a toll. But I’ll also feel… how secure it’ll make him feel. How safe. How…/ God, his _eyes_. /How perfect./ Obviously it would make him feel perfect. /I mean, just _look_ at him./ “It’s… a lot of responsibility, isn’t it?” she heard herself murmur.

His gaze flickered, almost shuttered, and he fought visibly not to look away. “Yeah.” His eyes turned solemn, liquid… filled with pain and the beginnings of regret that he had stripped himself naked, asked too much. “You don’t have to do this, Buffy.”

Actually, she kind of did. “Shut up.” And, sliding down his body, she set firmly to work undoing his belt. /Just knowing how long you’ve been alone, feeling everyone else…/ Jeez, just knowing how at everyone else’s mercy he was, just because of how vampires were made, when all the time he just wanted to belong to her… No. She didn’t want anyone else to own him. Not anymore. Just the thought that she could take him entirely away from Drusilla—God, the thought that _Angel_ , of all people, had a claim on Spike that she didn’t was _insane_ —it all meant that this needed to happen, like, _yesterday_. 

It was kind of terrifying, yes, the idea of holding that kind of power over him. Of taking that… vampirical a level of responsibility for his being. But. That he trusted her with it was immense, and… /I just have to be strong enough. Because it’s me or… _them_. Which just isn’t even an option, if I want him to be healthy; not all torn apart./

/Mine./ 

God, she really did want it. Scary, but true. Because whenever she thought about her _ex_ , of all people, having a claim on Spike that she didn’t, it made her want to rage and break things. /Don’t even get me started on _his_ ex; the crazy Conduit he Championed in the name of Chaos for a hundred fucking years. Just, no./

Spike was goddamned _hers_ and she would take him, keep him. 

And, on a completely other level… /Just the way you moved when I even _hinted_ at it tells me you need this./ God, she wanted to make him move like that again. Reduce him to shreds with just the slightest touch of her mouth. And if a little suck and lick had destroyed him, she could only imagine what _biting_ him would do. He was going to _disintegrate_. 

She couldn’t _wait_.

Not to mention that just knowing that the power differential between them could be evened out, the open circle of blood between them closed… 

His jeans dealt with, she caught his eager cock in her fist. “You know me well enough by now to know I never do anything I don’t want to.”

“Christ, Buffy, I…”

“Shh.” Catching him in her mouth, she swallowed him down ruthlessly.

“Fuck!” he exclaimed, and she dug her nails into his thighs, because he was really not making with the shushing right now. Tugged forward at his foreskin for a moment to get some slack, she nibbled a little at the loose flesh to make him crazy, then pulled back to reveal just a tiny portion of his cockhead and sucked a little around his slot. 

He scrabbled at the blankets. “Buffy!”

/Alright./ Sliding his foreskin back, she was merciful enough to feather him with too-light strokes that had him juddering up and down on the bed, fingers now clawing at the duster. And, wow, it looked like it was really just not going to take a whole lot tonight to get him to a bitable place. Just talking about it had him edgy as hell, and seriously; how long had he fantasized about this? 

From the way he was acting, probably a super long time. Maybe daily. And yet somehow he had managed to completely keep it from her, had never hinted at his desperate desire in the slightest.

Well, it was going to be tough living up to a fantasy. She’d do her best, but first she was going to have to slow him down a little, or no one was going to be living up to anything. Sliding one hand down, she circled his balls lightly with thumb and forefinger, tugged them away from his body. Relieved for the nonce he sank back down to the bed, muttering imprecations, but that stopgap had at least bought her a minute or two with him. 

She pulled off for a sec, kept on with just her hand. “You gonna live?” she asked, amused.

“Buffy… Bloody hell; just thinking that you might… That you’re gonna… That you… Christ, I don’t know if I…”

Wow. Usually she was the inarticulate one, but right now Spike could barely speak, he was so dissolved in emotions and overwhelmed by even the thought of what was about to happen. She was going to have to pull out all the stops here, really pay attention to his body if she was going to keep him from coming too soon; before she could do the claiming part, because that would be a serious let-down. “Just hang in there with me for a couple minutes, William,” she told him softly, because he was vulnerable right now, and calling him by that name was appropriate when he was there… and because it slowed him. Slowed the hungers of the demon, sank him into a morass of emotions. While he moaned in answer, shivering, she made quick work of undoing her own jeans, pushing them off… and slipped down past his wavering cock to kiss and nibble at the crease of his groin. He trembled, clutching desperately at the comforter and making noises that might even be classified as whimpering. Which was kind of impressive, considering she wasn’t actually touching anything particularly… Well. 

Lifting up again, she dropped a light kiss on the head of his cock in passing. It made him jerk up toward her mouth, tensing and shuddering, but no. He was too close, so she moved on, ignoring his moan of discontent to zero in on the place to one side and a little above it where there was a bare patch in the nest of light-brown curls. Nuzzled the tender scar there. 

He promptly curled up like a pill-bug. “Bloody hell.”

“Shh,” she told him again, and kissed the scar with extreme care. “I love you.” She would probably have nightmares about that bullet for a long time; how it had looked as it had pushed its blunt way out of his groin, so close to his cringing genitals, and the terrifying way he had screamed. The pooling blood...

Shaking her head to rid herself of the image, the sound, she sought other, more pleasurable noises. Slithered away again, back up his body. Kissed each scar with exceeding gentleness, all up his belly till she found his nipples. Tongued them while he arched again, catching back up to her movements with breathless certainty as she approached ground zero. Nibbled for a while at his collarbones, listening to him as he made incoherent noises, head thrown back against the collar of the duster, throat straining and corded. Traced the lines of his beautiful neck. And whispered to him, fingers trailing over the flesh there. “Can I make my own? Is that okay? On my side?”

His head snapped up, eyes blazing blue on hers with a desperate hunger. “Oh, Christ yes.”

Sliding over, she moved to nuzzle at his right side. He was shuddering in earnest now; every spare inch of his flesh trembling against her body. Smiling, she met his eyes boldly. “I want you inside of me when I take you, Spike. I’m going to crush your cock like you’ve never had it while I bite you, and I want to feel you come harder than you ever have when I claim you.”

“Oh, bloody fuck, oh God, oh bleeding fucking Christ God…”

She wasn’t even doing anything to him yet, and he’d already completely lost control of his words, was saying things that were probably against the law for vampires. Smirking, she lifted up, caught his cock in her hand, and brought him into her. Settled down with a low hum at the familiar, welcome pressure of his cool length parting aching flesh. Too many days, and god, she’d missed him. 

“Buffy, oh sodding fuck…” His fingers slipped around automatically to touch her clit, and hell yes, she wanted him, but not now. She wanted to focus on getting him off, without distractions. So, with a minimum of regret she caught his wrist, put his hand away from her, ignoring as she did her body’s screaming irritation at the interruption. 

“Later. Right now is for you.” And she gave him a nice little internal squeeze to remind him of exactly what they were doing here; a move calculated to silence all protests and end all thought in a certain vampire.

It worked, and his hands fell promptly away. He toppled back on the bed, all resistance foundering on the hard shoals of her Slayer strength. He groaned and began pumping helplessly up into her, lost to reason. But that way lay ruin, so… “Come here,” she told him, dragging him back up, and pulled him hard against her, circumventing his thrusts to kneel in his lap. His belt dug into her ass a little, but she ignored it to dig her nails into his shoulder blades just the way he liked. It took a certain mix of ruthlessness and kindness in turn to make love to both the man and the demon at once, but she loved to do it; loved what it did to him when she found the exact right balance. Loved the way he looked at her; like she was god or something as she rose and fell on him, rocking her hips into him with a little twist here to speed him, a dig of the nails there to slow him. The way his hands, falling to her hips, jerked and trembled and clenched hard. The way his fingers dug spasmodically into her flesh in response to every move and twitch; a slave to their rhythm. He was close; she could tell just from the way he tensed and relaxed infinitesimally with every jerk of her hips, the almost sobbing edge to his breaths, muffled against her naked shoulder. It was time for one last, final tease. 

She bent over his neck, laved the taut flesh with her tongue. Felt him convulse against her, moaning on the verge. Wondered, since she could only remember a few brief tastes lost within a few rough kisses, and that mixed with her own, what his blood would taste like. Would it be bitter, like Dracula’s, or much better, or… Well. She’d gotten used to other things. This couldn’t be any much more of an acquired taste, right? Another little twist. An internal gripping, and a small suck, to ready him. “Buffy!” an exhalation made in desperate warning.

“Tell me you want me,” she whispered, and it took on a whole new meaning now than it once had. Because this was for keeps. 

“Oh Christ; Buffy… _please!”_

It was enough. Permission and demand. Thrusting her hips hard against him, she clenched down with all she had on his trembling cock, drew in a deep breath… and bit down on him; a hard, sucking bite that used every ounce of strength she could bring to bear. And the thought came to her without effort; simple as breathing. Rang through her from some deep, primitive place beyond consciousness, as the tang of him touched her tongue.

/ _Mine_./

The flavor of blood filled her mouth; but a strange one, not like her own, tasted when a fist to the mouth had broken lips against teeth. Something different. Heavier, and yet oddly more vital. Almost… sweet. Almost… spicy. She swallowed reflexively, in the same instant as Spike let out a keening roar that she swore she could feel in her bones, surged up hard enough to lift her into the air… and came so hard, hips locked, that she imagined she could feel his release somewhere in her belly. “YoursYoursYOURS! Fuck _fuck FUCK_ God _BUFFY!”_

He had _never_ screamed her name like that before. It was a revelation.

And, in the same instant as the blood slid down her throat, a new awareness began to percolate in her. She began to feel him in a way she had never felt him before. Not just the way she already had; the thrumming tension of him broken in a sudden release, but waves of throbbing, surging pleasure cascading throughout his body—their body?—in long, shuddering aftershocks, so strongly that it nearly made her climax in reaction. “Oh, God!” she whispered, releasing his neck… because if that was what it was like to feel him _after_ he came, then feeling him _during_ was going to be… /Oh my _God_./ “Is that from the bite, or do you always…” 

Still buried in her neck, he pulled her down with him to subside onto the duster, moaning, his breath coming hard and cool against the heat of her own bite scar. She shuddered in reaction, ripples flowing through her, making her throb, and his fingers tightened hard in the spaces between her ribs to hold her fiercely against him as the sensations she felt ricocheted back to him… and they back to her; an endless and slowly-receding communion. Like being trapped within a funhouse-mirror made out of sensual pangs and pricks of desire, and how the hell were they ever going to make it out of bed _again_ , after this?

Also, his blood was doing a _thing_ in her belly now; coiling up hot like the most potent liquor she had ever tasted. Swirling into her bloodstream and making her lightheaded, and she was rapidly realizing that she was starting to feel very, very high. “Spike,” she whispered uncertainly as the heat spread through her limbs.

“I know,” he whispered back. “It was like that for me, with you. Always, but especially the first time.”

It was getting stronger. Building in her so that she didn’t know if she could contain it. Her skin was going to leap off her body as she sizzled underneath the envelope with a power like the sun. She felt like she could tear down a mountain. If Glory was in front of her now she’d just straight rip the bitch’s head off. She might even take Illyria on right now, bare-fisted, and holy crap, why hadn’t she realized…

Vampire blood was potent enough, in its own way, to bring people back from the dead. More or less; just as Slayer blood was sometimes the only thing strong enough to save a vamp about to dust. Just another linkage between their two species, and why had she never realized how high it would make a Slayer to take vampire blood? /Because it didn’t do this for me when I tasted Dracula’s, and he was older, so why would I?/

But then, the claim thing hadn’t worked for Dracula either. She would have to ask Spike why. Later. In the meantime, she was high as fuck, and there wasn’t much she could do about it. She couldn’t just go out and kill something. Not in this city. Too many politics. It would cause problems. 

Well, amendment. There was _one_ thing, she supposed. She had this nice, willing vampire under her with whom to ride the (still-growing) high, so… “I need you, Spike.”

“I know,” he answered again, hoarsely, and his hands were sliding up her back now, bringing her breasts to his mouth. “I’ve got you.”

He was just as high; from being claimed, the energy of it thrumming through him. A different high, though; one that had him glowing at her with a kind of effulgent blaze of utter devotion as he buried himself at her nipples, nipping and sucking and giving her exactly what she wanted, and his hand was already descending, and oh _god_ yes. His mouth made the glowing supernova under her skin concentrate to where he touched, held her together, and the thought of _that_ where he…

She bit her lip hard enough to draw blood at the first touch of his fingers on her incredibly swollen clit; gasped and jerked hard against him as the maddening heat exploded under the cool of his fingers; a perfect contrast that made her damn near lose her mind. With a low moan he abandoned her nipples to disengage, his cock stripping out of her so fast she made a sound of fierce protest as he dove for her, and maybe she might have said something choice about ending up on her back without warning, but it was for a good cause, because he had performed some kind of magical sexual salaam to fold himself into position before she could even really think of words. Had his face buried in her somewhere so deep she was sure his tongue was in places only his cock could reach, his fingers still working her clit, cool against the tremendous heat everywhere, and she wasn’t…

Not enough, no, dammit, she needed…

No need for words, not anymore; not now he could feel her and she could feel him. He was up, fingers inside her before she could say a word, setting her on cold fire as he thrust hard against her g-spot while his mouth switched to an impossible tattoo on her clit, and god, she was going to come already, she was going to… “Bite me, dammit, Spike!”

His mouth started to drift down. She closed her legs against him, heels dragging him up. She wanted done with the other marks. Wanted them gone. /Close all those circles tonight, make them _all_ gone./ 

He slid up along her body, thumb working her clit while she writhed, burning, against him, throbbed against the beautiful salving chill of the fingers inside her, and dammit, she was going to… She was hanging on by a thread, she was…

He stopped everything. She let out a relieved-anguished breath. “You’re a bastard.”

The relentless fingers started again, and she curled up hard around him, jolting as his face neared her throat, approached his left side.

She turned her head there, guiding him to the right. 

“Buffy,” he breathed, startled.

She caught his ambered gaze. Held it. “All yours again,” she answered. “Please.”

Something fierce crossed his troubled gaze. “All mine,” he lisped. “You’re sodding right.” And with a low growl, he dove for her neck, the messy scars there beckoning. And his fingers now were making her blood sing, and okay, it wouldn’t be as good for him, sure. The last time he had done this, in Hell-A, before the time-loop had taken it away from them, he’d said that tasting ‘the leavings of others’ would soil the experience a bit. But once he got past all that, down to clean blood, it should be the same; and then they’d be done. The circle would be closed utterly, between them. 

“Tell me, when you do.”

“Yes.”

The perfect contrast of his hand had her fluttering on the edge of conflagration. So close, his breath teasing the fullness of climax and bite and… And then he was pulling out, leaving her wanting, and oh _god_ , yes, he was going to come into her as she came, he was going to put out her fire with…

She arched up to accept the fullness of his cock, her body screaming for completion. And was stunned when, as his fiercely working thumb toppled her over the edge and his fangs cut home at her throat; as she felt the pull of the blood calling her inexorably to join him, make her his, and he growled his claim, she clenched down hard on… nothing.

/Damn, damn you, you bastard/ she thought, even as she shuddered into the low, pulling, growling darkness of lightheaded, flying ecstasy that was his bite. As the high of her own claiming swirled the entire thing into some new, burning inferno and made her come again, and yet again; and she fumbled for his cock; because he would feel her, and he would come from that even if he wouldn’t come from biting her, with how high she was from _his_ blood, the stubborn bastard, and she would have him in her hand at least while he did.

But he was keeping his hips well away from her somehow, and as he pulled off, his tongue sealing the bloodied holes… only then did he lean back and, lifting her leg. And his golden eyes glared into hers, bright with awe as he shoved hard into her where she shuddered in the aftermath, hollow and only half-satisfied. “All bloody _mine,_ Buffy, oh, Christ…”

And oh god; he was insistently hard and hot from her blood, and she was still lightheaded; a little dizzy even, so that his thrusting, low and steady like a shark under the water, was like an extra heartbeat beneath her own speeding thing, making her feel erratic and two-natured, and… “Oh _God_ …”

He growled again, watching her and enjoying her way too much; high as hell on her blood and parting her like an unaccustomed fever. Usually he was cool, soothing, but right now he had her twitching and sparking from sensory overload with everything in her too tight and unready, but she was warming up quick and still burning, and they were going to burn up together, because she could…

Oh god, she could _feel_ him. She could feel her blood rushing through him like surges of power, of life, could feel enormous pleasure-pain radiating outward from his groin to burst throughout his entire body as he moved in her. The sensations he was feeling exploded through her nerves to mingle with her own overwhelmed system, and she was going to… 

/Oh _God_ …/

“That’s right, Love. Go again; come with me. Christ, pet, to watch you was one thing, but to bloody _feel_ you, to know what I bring to you is more than I could ever deserve in a thousand lifetimes; go on then…”

She really wasn’t sure what kind of noise she made. She didn’t care. She couldn’t hear it under the ones he was making when she fell over the brink, and carried him with her. And felt them both.

***  
  
  
  
  
  
  
So, there's THAT finally done.  
I really do apologize, yet again, for being so behind on comment-replies. Life's being a bear, but I really will get back to all of you, and I appreciate every one of you!!!


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You're all wonderful, and I am grateful for every one of you, argh... and how is this already at ch. 20?!  
> Augh.  
> Anyway... on we go.

“Oh my God.”

An amused vampire noise sounded from somewhere in the general vicinity of the new bite, making her shudder. “You said that already, Love. And I already told you, I’m not that bloke. Far from it. Transmutation jokes notwithstanding.”

“What?”

“Nothing, pet.” Another snuffling exploration. “Christ, it’s nice to smell you here and not have anyone else in bed with us anymore.”

She shivered again. “You could’ve done it a long time ago,” she reminded him pointedly.

“Did already. Not my bloody fault the sodding time-loop took all my hard work away from me.”

He had a point. “Is that why you put me through hell?” she demanded, trying her best to work some irritation into her voice… though mostly all she could manage was ‘languorous with an edge’. “Because I made you taste them at the last minute, and you wanted to make me suffer too?”

He snorted derisively into her neck. “Put you through hell, is it?”

“I hate coming on nothing when you bite me. It’s unsatisfying as hell. And you know it. You took your fingers away on purpose, just when I was about to…”

“Yeah, well…” He leaned away a little, pulled a regretful face. “Unconscious revenge, maybe. Or maybe I just wanted to save you for myself. Wanted to enjoy you a little after I had my own high in place, yeah? Call me selfish…”

She gave his shoulder a shove. “You’re a bastard,” she repeated her verdict flatly.

“I’ll give you what you want next time,” he promised faithfully. 

“You better.”

He was silent a moment, looking thoughtful, then… “Hell of a thing, though, innit?” he asked tentatively. “Both of us having a claim?”

“Oh my God!” she agreed again, fervently, because feeling his orgasm had been… /Well, let’s just say that basically having two orgasms at once—two completely different kinds of orgasms—ranks high on the list of ‘experiences you want to repeat forever and ever and pretty much ruin you for anything or anyone else ever again’./ “I think… that’s a dance step we should definitely work on perfecting. A lot.”

She was only slightly surprised when he dissolved into near-silent chuckles. She had felt them coming… which would have been creepy, this way-too-intimate connection, if it didn’t come with an equally desperate need for him even more insanely strong than the one she had already felt, and a wild longing that made literally zero sense considering she currently had him in her arms, still had him inside her, had most of his body wrapped around her own, and was practically breathing him in. 

Apparently mutual claims came pre-loaded with some kind of oxytocin-like thing that made it so you didn’t resent the presence of the other person literally living in your bloodstream, because otherwise it would sure get old quick. She figured they’d probably get used to the extra senses fairly swiftly, the way you tuned out background noise when you moved into a house next to train tracks or an airport. Other people came by and demanded to know how you could sleep in a place like that, and you realized you’d stopped hearing it. “What’s so funny?”

“Slayer, I think at this point we’ve gone from dancing to fucking right on the floor of the club. Or maybe just standin’ there swaying while everyone else watches and wonders what the hell song we’re listenin’ to, because it sure the hell isn’t the same one the band’s playin’.”

He had a point. It brought a slow smile to her face in response. “Well… that’s kind of always summed us up… so that’s fair.” She was about two seconds from falling out. And that was bad, somehow, she was sure. There was something she was supposed to do…

“You go ahead and sleep, Love. I’ll text the Niblet.”

“Hmm? Oh!” She started to come back to consciousness, moved to flop a boneless arm in the general direction of the nightstand where she’d left the phone. Felt a warmish hand catch her around the wrist and bring her back to station-keeping at his side. It was weird, how tepid-to-lukewarm her vampire got after feeding. Soothing, but… weird. 

Giving up, she subsided against his chest, cheek sinking deeper into the hollow below his collarbone as he shifted, caught up the phone, made the _click-clicking_ noises that bespoke texting. /He’s actually pretty good at that, for a vampire. I wonder if he had a phone when he was working for Angel…/ It was her last conscious thought for a long while.

She woke up from a completely dreamless slumber some uncounted number of hours later with an extremely full bladder and a body singing with energy. Her eyes snapped open to find herself face-to-face with a Spike-nipple. Rotated her head enough to get a one-eyed glimpse of the rest of him; lying back with his arms behind his head, watching her with a smug expression written all over his face. He was dappled in a suspiciously golden light, which…

/Oh!/ Daylight filtered in from under the edges of the burgundy-and-gold curtains to dance on the hardwood floors, and holy crap, she’d slept the night away without even moving. What the hell. It had to be, like…

“It’s only about six,” Spike informed her blandly, and nodded toward the bathroom. “I’ve ordered in. Go on, Love. Food should be here any minute. Feed you up, then you can call the Bit.”

It was bizarre to go about the daily business of life in the apartment she had lived in for almost nine months, especially when everything was so subtly different. Spike was there with her, inside her blood as always, but more strongly than before; surging through her veins and sitting somewhere in the back of her (mind?) like a sort of extra presence that made the side of her that was all energy and urges and grr sit up and take notice and be all _aware_ and… /Oh. My demon-y parts are super-duper wide-awake right now./ Which kind of made a lot of sense, she supposed, if she’d just claimed another demon as a mate. That kind of thing tended to make demon-y sorts get all antsy. 

It probably explained the ongoing high, beyond the simple, physical mechanics of ingesting blood, however altered it was by the vamp-demon to keep vampires alive and running around being all strong and stuff. 

It was a wonder she’d been able to sleep at all. Though… Sleeping after sex hadn’t really ever been a big thing, for her. It had always taken the edge off, yeah, but it hadn’t ever completely relaxed her, much less exhausted her. Not since that first time with Spike, when they had both finally succumbed after, what? Five, six times? The sheer physical _relief_ of it had probably had a lot to do with it, then. But there had always been this feeling; this ongoing drive that something wasn’t finished for her, that there was more to do, more to accomplish. She had always written it off as uneasiness, fed by the fact that she was doing something she shouldn’t, that she was wrong, that she shouldn’t be there with him, that… /But maybe that was partly the demon inside me. Because it was still bound to Angel, and no matter how much I… _We_ wanted Spike…/

That thought had never once occurred to Buffy, till just now, but it made so much sense that it floored her in retrospect. Blood links were everything, and if she had felt, on some primitive, demon-y level back then that she had been cheating, somehow, by being with Spike, even if she’d intellectually (i.e., humanly) known that she and Angel were long over… 

She hadn’t felt that with Riley, but Riley was human. It wouldn’t bother the demon. Another _vampire_ , though… /And, okay, maybe I finally get Angel’s problem, now. Really belatedly./ 

Still. She had been the one with the burden of having been all… claimed. It had behooved Angel to play it a little cooler, since he had the control in that damn context. She hadn’t had a hold on _him_. /And for God’s sake, you could always have just, you know, _let me go,_ dammit./ She really wasn’t sure how someone did that, but there had to be a way, if Drusilla had partially ‘disowned’ Spike during the whole cattle prod fiasco. 

Anyway, it really kind of put things into perspective. Because no matter how strained the link with Angel had been by then, it had still been there. So maybe Buffy’s inner demon-nature had felt ashamed for giving herself to a vamp who wasn’t Angel; and how infuriating was that, in retrospect? God; no wonder she hadn’t let herself fall each time she and Spike… No wonder that every time she had felt the screaming in her blood to let Spike bite her, she had run shrieking from herself in horror, and no wonder she had beaten herself up about it so badly, wanting it! Her own demon side had been freshly roused to wakefulness by the second of her human deaths, to face a weakened linkage with an outdated blood-bond and a desperate need to find a new one with a vampire who actually made sense to her… but one she could not have. And, against all the laws of blood and bonding, she had sought it anyway. 

The two sides of her had been at war, and both of them had felt horrified by the struggle. And Spike, who couldn’t understand why she couldn’t feel him, couldn’t want him the way he wanted her, had been driven mad by the need to make his potential mate _understand_.

She had dealt with it. Muddied the linkage with her flirtation with Dracula. Lived through a third, almost-death that had weakened the link with Angel even further, to the point where Spike could get through without interference. To the point where her demon-side had been strong enough to declare what it actually wanted. And, with the soul he had acquired or put up front or whatever had happened, Spike had utterly confused the blood-sensors. And they had drawn close enough again to throw off the system. Only for her to lose him.

After, since they had come back together, it had been different. In Hell-A, with Angel human and her momentarily free, with both their demons somnolent and with half a claim between them she had always felt… so relaxed with him. Able to rest. Not necessarily sleep, per se, but she had felt calm, at least, after sex. At peace with him in a way she had never felt before, during their more disastrous affair. And back here, even with the demons back at full readiness, it had been more or less the same. But there had still been that feeling that something wasn’t quite… completed.

Now that feeling was utterly gone. That sense that something was waiting, that a sentence had been lying uncompleted between them, suspended between one breath and the next, had vanished. 

Her inner demon-nature had been feeling shortchanged, she realized. It had recognized long ago in Spike an appropriate mate, and she had denied that part of her nature what it needed. It had taken what it could get with Angel, been collared but not alternatively fulfilled, and howled under the uneven yoke. Been abandoned, rootless and improperly claimed with Spike, for years… and then, once more, locked in a one-sided arrangement. A better one, a proper one, but still uneasy. Wanting more.

Now, finally, it was at peace. And so… she had slept. 

Turning her face from the high, shining window in the little bathroom above the shower, she exited again to move around the wall, and stood in the doorway watching her lover lying, bathed in the muted glow of day on a bed she had once inhabited. And smiled slightly at the utter relaxation in every line of his being. He had slept, too. Had watched her for a while, then slept. She could tell just by looking at him. “Does it feel better?” she asked him softly.

He didn’t need to clarify with her to know what she meant. “Buffy, feeling you that way… Not feeling anyone else…” 

His tones were reverent, and his eyes blazed brilliant on hers like pictures she’d seen in textbooks; of blue stars in space, burning and beautiful and different. And hers. “I get it. I wish I could’ve done it sooner.”

“Yeah, well.” His cheek ticced briefly in belated frustration. “My own fault, I guess.”

She looked away, frowning slightly. “I think… part of why I didn’t get it is because… When Dracula…” She hesitated when she felt him tighten up; inside her, in every part of her. “He tried, but it didn’t work on me.”

The silence between them this time was one of the few that wasn’t precisely easy. “What happened, exactly?” he asked carefully, and the words were spoken on one of those breaths that bespoke a concerted effort to withhold judgment. To offer information without emotion, for which she was grateful. It was, after all, a retrospective event, from a time in which he hadn’t even declared his own feelings—if he had even known them yet—and long before they had been involved. 

“Well… you know he bit me…”

“Obviously.” His tones were tight, but not withering, and again without judgment. “Ponce was always good at thrall. Admit I didn’t think he was _that_ good, but I suppose he must’ve…” Another short, hitched breath. “…Had somethin’ you wanted, or you wouldn’t’ve let him take you in. You’re too bloody strong-willed even for him.”

He was saying she’d wanted it, on some level. Which might have hurt, except… maybe she had. “I wonder now if maybe… I wanted Angel’s claim gone, on some level. Instinctively. Like my demon-side was telling me to let him, so I could then stake him and be free, the way I couldn’t with Angel, you know?” And she met his blue gaze frankly.

He digested that for a second before essaying a cautious response. “Well. You didn’t know that it wouldn’t quite work that way.” But his eyes were understanding now, on hers.

“Yeah.” She looked away. He wasn’t going to like this part. The part he hadn’t known about till now. “But while he had me, he got me to… taste him.”

Dead silence from the bed, then an abrupt rustle in the sheets as he shot up. “Bloody Christ, Buffy! How…”

She looked away. “He called me… kindred. Said he could explain it all to me. The darkness inside me, the way I felt. Said he could teach me my history, why my power was rooted in the connection between us. What you feel with the blood, what I’m really capable of if I took it. He knew I needed to know about myself; about you. He knew that they’d kept me ignorant, that I didn’t know my true nature, and he _used_ that.”

Spike closed his eyes, shuttering the blue. Nodded once, swallowing. “Can see why it didn’t work then. Wasn’t enough of a connection. You just wanted information. And it was just the once. If… If it’d been Peaches; or even me, by that point…” A breath whooshed out of him then. “Bloody hell, that’s maybe even partly why it didn’t take well enough to keep you under, since you and I, and that sodding spell of Red’s…”

She was having a tough time following him even with the claim rolling like a tide between them. His mercurial shifts in emotion were like undertows, jerking her first one way and then the other before she could catch her breath. “What are you…”

His eyes popped open. Riveted on hers. “You said your demon wanted to know. Wanted to be free. Reason for that, maybe, pet. It saw an out and it took it, but maybe there was more behind that restlessness, yeah? The one holding the bond on you’d been gone a long time, and you’d just spent a little time making the acquaintance of another. Maybe your demon saw somethin’ it liked, wanted somethin’ different. Saw its chance to get clear, yeah? So the business with Drac didn’t take because even if the human part of you might go under… the stronger part of you had already chosen another mate.”

She stared at him, amazed. “The… The will-be-done spell?”

He shifted one shoulder in a not-quite-shrug. “Settled right into it, didn’t we? Both of us. Didn’t seem too unhappy to be affianced, either of us. Tiffed a bit, yeah, but only in the way demons do.”

Buffy let out a breath. “Yeah, I guess for us that’s foreplay.”

He nodded, eyes locked on hers. “Think… maybe all that spell did was let the kids out to play, turned off the bits of us that were thinkin’ too much and always confused about the business. The parts of us hung up on labels, yeah? And after that, when it turned off and our minds turned back on, your demon saw a chance to get free of Angel and went after it, because right about then I for bleedin’ sure wasn’t offerin’.”

“Oh.” God, it made so much sense. And explained a hell of a lot. Like, why nothing Dracula did really made any real dent for her… and why—Powers and Champions aside—she hadn’t been able to keep Spike out of her head or send him away from then on out. Why she had been so confused, torn between blood debt to one vampire and her inner desire for another.

And why everything felt so right now. Like such a very long time coming. /God. I died for the first time, and then you showed up. And my demon-y side saw a guy who’d be the perfect mate for her, but you already belonged to someone else, and I was a mess of conflict already. Not really convinced I should be with Angel, yet, but he’d already started making his case to that side of me. He just barely had the edge with my demon. And that side of me was used to being… what’s the word? Sub… something. Kept under wraps. So I just let myself roll with the demon I had on hand; the one that was also all under wraps. Let myself get claimed by him instead, because he was all guilt-boy, and I felt guilty about my new demon-y urges and feelings and all these weird thoughts about whether everything I was doing was… Whether anything made sense anymore./ 

She lifted her eyes to Spike, amazed at the realization. /I had all this… rebellion boiling up, fighting all the guilt I always felt, just for being me… and that rebellion was… my nature, telling me I didn’t _have_ to be guilty. That I could just be me. Like you always told me, but of course by the time you got to me, I was so used to guilt it seemed right, and you seemed wrong. Because Faith, and then everything fell apart; and you came back, and I was just so conflicted… I think because you were free but I wasn’t./

It was another realization, one that hit her broadside, almost shocked her with its weight. “I was so _mad_ at you for being free, Spike,” she heard herself tell him. “Free, when I wasn’t, because you work different than I do. Even if you were still bound to Dru, you can always go make a new bond, make a new nest, strike out on your own… but I still belonged to someone else, no matter what I wanted…” His eyes stared back, caught on hers, recognition stark in them, then quiet and pained. “So I took it out on you,” she went on, agonized. “I took it out on you for years, told you I was disgusted with you for loving me, when really I was just so angry that I couldn’t love you. I thought it was because you were a demon, when really it was because I was bound to someone else, and _why?_ ” /What a pair, our demons. Both just wanting to be loved, always something standing in our way. Even our own brains, sometimes./ Reaching out, she touched his cheek. “I recognized you too, even then. Even then, I wanted you. Even when you belonged to someone else, I wanted you.” Cupped him, smiling a little sadly. “Always wanted you.”

“Buffy…”

Time to turn this mood around. “Obviously I was desperate, if I was gonna let Dracula crack me loose to get to you.” At his startled look, she laughed; a sharp bark of amusement that had Spike eyeing her with suspicion. “I kinda wanna run into him again, now we’re claimed. He’d be so thrown.”

The wary look slid into a smug grin; one that dashed away every evidence of old pain in his eyes. “Bugger still owes me eleven quid. We can look him up if you want.”

“I don’t want to rub his nose in it that bad. But if we ever do bump elbows with him, I’ll hold him down while you rifle through his pockets.”

“I love you, Slayer.”

She would never tire of hearing him say it that way; open and free and without fear. “You’re just saying that because I’m making you look good to all your vampire buddies.”

He snorted derisively. “Wouldn’t call that git a ‘buddy’.” 

She’d already moved on, though, and was now frowning pensively. “Spike, if we’d done this back in Hell-A… how crazy would it have made Angel? You know, if he’d’ve come over sometime to try to push you around, and you just…” She waved her hand a little, uncertain how to say it but aware she probably wouldn’t need to. They both knew what would happen now. 

She’d taken over all his bonds. Angel no longer had any hold over Spike. Nor did Drusilla. 

No vamp did. He had been utterly re-homed. /In me. _God_./ The spectacular trust it showed, for one thing… And the fact that he’d wanted it for so long, even before they’d _had_ that trust, was an honor beyond counting.

It was Spike’s turn to let out a short, sharp bark of a laugh; one that sounded absolutely triumphant. “Christ, I’d’ve loved to wave it in his face. He’d’ve tried to murder me for it, but…” And all mirth slipped from his eyes as he looked at her. “You know how he’s gonna look at you when he finds out, someday.”

She found herself, at the moment, supremely unconcerned with Angel’s promised future reactions to her having claimed another vampire—and, specifically, Spike—as her own personal property, and crawled onto the bed, over said vampire’s waiting body. “Sad day.” Draped herself over him. “I’m starving. Did you order food?”

“A course I did. Could feel you rumblin’ from out here. Had me convinced it was me, which we all know is sodding impossible right now…” A hand slid up along her ass to rest in the curve of her lower back. He was still lukewarm, though edging back toward room temperature. 

She could feel how it felt for him to have her skin draped over his body. The warm flush of heat she brought to him when she touched him, prickling all over his flesh in a heated rush that ran from scalp to heels; like flirting with open flame.

/Wow./

She shivered and closed her eyes against him, half-willing to just drift back to somnolence as their temperatures equalized at every point of contact. “I think whatever part of me is a demon is super happy right now,” she murmured into his scar-riddled torso. “I feel so weird. Completely wide-awake and at the same time I’ve never been so relaxed.”

“Never seen you cash in your chips like that after a shag,” Spike agreed, a note of wonder in his voice. “Couldn’t wake you for anything; not that I wanted to. Finally just gave in and had a nice siesta with you. Don’t mind sayin’ I feel damn nice m’self.”

“I think maybe… I’ve been keeping a part of myself on edge with you for a long time, wondering when I would let it… commit, if that makes sense. Guess it’s kind of unfair. That part of me saw what it wanted a long time ago, with you, but first it was stuck with someone else, so that even when I was with you it felt…”

“A bit torn, yeah. A bit disgusted with itself for strayin’.” Spike’s voice perked, now, with belated understanding. Regret.

“And then, in Hell-A, it was so much better. It was like I could relax. But there was still something missing… and now it’s all good. It’s alright, and…”

“Yeah,” he answered quietly, and his hand slipped up to her cheek. “Come here, Slayer.”

She let him pull her up, kissed him back, long and slow and deep. Threaded her legs with his when he tugged her in close, so that their bodies aligned, and everything was right. And how could she have ever thought any of this was in any way wrong? 

“Mine now,” Spike was muttering; mostly in English, between kisses, and to hell with that.

She fisted her hands in his hair, loosening whatever remained of his carefully-gelled locks, pulled his head back till he met her eyes. “That’s my line.”

His gaze was steady on hers, unyielding. “Always yours, Buffy. Always have been. Always will be.”

/Damn right./

“Blood or no blood,” he whispered, going back to her mouth, peppering her face with kisses, legs working restlessly against her body and his ever-present urgency flooding them both. “No matter what…”

Well, this was going places she wasn’t sure she could finish before breakfast, despite the fact that she could feel what he wanted as if it was her own desire… and not that she was in the slightest bit opposed. /Just… after food./ 

She slid a hand up along his back to still him, but he had already slowed, feeling her. “Wish to Christ you could get what you needed from me as well,” he whispered, “but I bloody well love to watch you eat.” He was having a hard time stopping, though, his mouth slipping down now to do ticklish, perfect things to her neck and throat. “Feel as if I could live off of you, Buffy. The taste of your gorgeous cunny, the smell of you hot for me; Christ, you’re a banquet…”

“Mmm, you’re not so bad yourself…” She locked her teeth down on his shoulder, just shy of his new bite-mark, making him squirm. Felt a thrill shoot through him that made him jerk, rigid against her, felt his erection twitch against her belly. And maybe she was seriously reconsidering just how hungry she was.

She leaned back a little to inspect his neck. Reached out to lightly prod at the bite with one finger, at marks that were nothing like a vamp’s, and which would probably be gone in another hour. They were already fading fast, since he’d had her blood, too. A wide, double crescent, the flush of a small bruise still within, livid only at the very center but fading to purple and yellow and then nothing beyond the filling impressions of her teeth.

He shuddered and groaned at even that slight brush of a touch, his urgency racking up to something so desperate that it flooded her, swamped the emptiness in her belly with a surge of need so vast she forgot everything else. “You want me to stop for now, pet, that is really not the way to go about it.” His hips were now beating a tattoo against her abdomen, and what the hell. 

“Come here.” Sliding her knee over his gorgeous butt, she dragged him in close, slid her hand down to catch him. Pushed up, forehead to his. 

“Oh, Christ,” he whispered, and she had him. Settled down slowly, pulling him in and biting her lip as she felt his response mingling with her own. The always-perfect wonder of him, settling into the hollow places of her and making her whole even when she hadn’t known she was empty, and slaking the fires of her being. And him; lost. Vulnerable, and given up entirely to her in this moment. And, my god; the way she _felt_ to him. Perfect pressure all around to give boundaries to an unhomed existence, and incandescent heat to warm him; like fire, like life. 

Bending her head, she laved her bite on his neck, slow and loving. And felt him shudder, coming undone against her. He buried his face in her shoulder, his breath going to pieces. Went still as he forgot to breathe anymore, moving like a trembling thing. “I’ve got you now,” she whispered. /I’ll be your home./

After all, it was only fair. He’d been hers for a long time now. The one who would never leave. They’d lost everything but each other years since. And found this out of the wreckage, only to realize… it was the only thing they’d ever really wanted to keep, anyway. “I’ve got you.”

His hands tightened on her ribs. Pulled her closer. “Never let you go, Buffy. Never leave you alone. Never leave me alone.”

“Never,” she agreed. 

That, after all, was what home really was all about. 

/What we’re really all about./

***

She came back down the hall, tossed the freshly-washed comforter on the bed. Threw Spike the pillow-cases. Smirking, he slid them cheerfully onto the dented pillows, then caught the edges of the blanket when she billowed it in his general direction and helped her situate it on top of the mattress they had so thoroughly despoiled for the last several hours. 

Between all the sex and the food stains, washing it was really the least she could do. After all, she was officially turning the place over to Andrew and Mia, forever and ever and all that. Reclaiming it in the name of reunioning was all well and good, and kind of along the lines of what they had done in Spike’s apartment, a sort of, ‘this was where Buffy was lonely and thinking of Spike, but now that’s over’. They had chased those ghosts very thoroughly away, if not in as many rooms as they’d done in Spike’s monk-cell of an apartment in LA, and it was time to make the place presentable again. 

Spike was only mocking her a tiny bit as she smoothed the lines of the comforter, his expression making it very clear that he found all this domesticity amusing and that he was putting up with it mostly because it earned him, in his parlance, ‘a lot of brilliant shagging’. It was a front, though, since they both knew he had always liked a nice crypt, made up just so, and that he had never exactly lacked in the housekeeping department. Even if his stuff had been secondhand or repurposed, his décor had always been more comfy-leaning-toward-decadent than punk… and he’d never let it all just lay around to get stepped on. Heck; he had even managed to rope her into helping him decorate, that one memorable time with the oriental rugs he’d dragged in from god alone knew where; though that task had, like most of her visits during that period, ended in a bout of wild and crazy sex rather than in any way finishing the interior-decorating task they had begun. It had even been fun. Almost comradely, considering their usual, hostile passages at arms.

Still, she had fled, in the end, leaving him to finish on his own. Which he had done, with aplomb and an eye to style, because Spike had certainly never fit the mold of ‘slobby vampire’. And, to judge by some of his snarky comments while on patrol, had always looked down on vamps who had messy nests. 

Now that she thought of it, it probably hadn’t been all Tara who had kept Revello looking ‘tidy’ while she’d been dead. He’d basically lived there with them, put up with Dawn like a tired parent; and while Willow had no doubt been buried in her books half the time and might not have noticed a bomb going off, Spike still to this day generally acted like he would explode into nervous-nanny mode if Dawn left a candy wrapper on the floor of the bus, much less got into any serious trouble. 

He tried to be chill about it, but he was all Mr. Censorious with her when he wasn’t being Amused Fun Guy; this weird combination of older brother and Mama Hen. Seeing this weird, nesty side of her guy would freak Buffy out except that she could only imagine how much worse it had to have been when she had been dead, and Spike had been doing it with a whole world of guilt hanging over his head. 

Now he did it in a kind of half-laid-back way; sort of a combination of idle threats and occasional putting his foot down. But there were some threadbare moments, and… The more frightening thing was, Dawn actually _let_ him tell her what to do and mostly didn’t protest. In fact, and far more freaksome, little sis acted like she _liked_ the boundaries. 

It was scary.

/He doesn’t do it just for my sake, either. The Dawn thing, or the, like, getting her to clean up. Any of it. And I bet he wasn’t keeping his crypt neat when I was sleeping with him just to make himself look good in front of me. He’s not a slob. It’s, like… leftover Victorian-guy stuff, or…/ Their room in the Pink Palace had been well-organized. Neat; probably far more so before she’d gotten there than after, if with a few scattered liquor bottles and some candle wax here and there for ambiance. /He’s just… A wild contradiction in terms, like always./ “Don’t look at me like that,” she told him easily as he caught the other end of the comforter and did his pretend-tolerant, ‘I’m only doing this for the sex’ charade. “It’s only fair. And neither of them have vamp noses.”

Spike tilted his head at her in that way that said he thought she was crazy. “You think the bint thought we were gonna play pinochle after she left, is it?”

“Oh, shut up.” Bed taken care of, she moved over to the window and twitched the curtain aside for a quick, assessing glance. The sun was well on the other side of the apartment now and westering. It should be safe. Still, she shot a quick question at him, caught his nod before she pulled them open the rest of the way open. Looked out over the sunset city, frowning and anxious. Rehearsed the plan again. “Soon as it’s dark enough, we go get Dawn, throw all the stuff in the bus…” They had had to while away the hours today, more or less. She’d had her food, and they’d had more sex because it was them. Spike’s new hobby of getting her off while she was eating had continued unabated, and now he could feel what she was feeling that had of course led to even more sex. Eventually they had gotten around to putting their clothes back on and getting to work. Packed up anything she had left in the place and moved it and Dawn’s stuff into the front room. By which time it had been… well, around one, because breakfast with a side of sex had taken a really long time.

Then, though it had felt like tearing off a limb to leave him alone there, she had made a run for the closest mortuary to pick him up some blood for the road, because god knew when they would get more. Spike had told her a little more about that outlet somewhere along about halfway through her breakfast, somewhat after the sex was done and she wouldn’t be distracted or lose her appetite (not that she didn’t have a strong stomach after years of slaying and dealing with the subject matter). Apparently funeral homes were a cheaper bet than hospitals sometimes, especially in demon-heavy towns, because morticians had to drain the bodies of blood before embalming them anyway. “It’s dead blood rather than blood taken from the living, sure; but so’s slaughterhouse blood, and at least this is human. Bit like living off leftovers, yeah? And besides, least this sort doesn’t have the aftertaste of preservatives. Long as it hasn’t gone over yet… Six of one, half dozen of the other. And depending on the source, and how many parlors there are in town, the locals might not have caught on enough to charge as much as the black-market scalpers at the hospital back door.” 

That educational little side-trip had knocked off an hour and change, since sans the ability to drive the motorcycle on her own she’d had to walk-slash-use-public-transport. /Note to self to maybe get Spike to give _me_ driving lessons. I should get in ahead of Dawn, right?/ Though the thought of learning to drive a motorcycle sounded kind of terrifying. /Maybe, like, a mo-ped./

And then… Well, then they’d run out of things to do. Hence, a little more sex, and whatever. No one was around to judge them, and sex when you could literally feel each other’s sensations was just really, really good and new and fun, okay?

It was approximately six forty-something now, and they’d done all the damage they could in this apartment. Their ship was leaving at ten, hopefully having put together whatever arrangements could be managed for Dawn and Spike in the intervening twenty-four hours. That gave them approximately three hours to race the motorcycle up to Settebagni, go get Dawnie and the bus, try to beat traffic down here, throw everything into it, and bail down to the harbor. They hadn’t paid a dime to hold their spot on the ship, so hopefully their Lister captain was as good as his word if they ran a little late. 

The sun wasn’t exactly going to go down on their clock, and probably they should’ve headed back to Dawn last night. /That’s what happens when you’re stupid and fall asleep after sex and waste the nighttime hours./ 

“We’ll be fine, pet. If they went to all the trouble to retrofit the boat, they’re not gonna cry over a quarter-hour, do we run a bit behind. And if they do, we’ll just find another ship.”

She huffed and turned around, crossing her arms at him. You’re so blasé. Yesterday you wanted nothing to do with Rome, and now you’re completely chill about being here…”

Grinning, he strode closer, dragged her resisting body into his arms. “Still not chuffed about being here, Love. Hate this bloody city. Can’t even have a nice brawl without stepping on someone’s toes, and definitely rather go somewhere I don’t have to run into that Immortal twat. Just, you’ve given me my pride back, yeah? Don’t have to face the sodding place feelin’ like a whipped cur with my tail between my legs, so I feel as if I can wave farewell to the stinking city with a smile on my face. I’m not fussed over it anymore.”

She felt her lips curve in a matching smile. “We could just stay, then, if it doesn’t bother you. I could move back pretty easy, since I know Italian now, and…”

He tensed immediately. “Sod that!"

It was just too damned much fun to tease him. “So I guess that’s a no to moving back to anywhere in Italy?”

He breathed through his nose for a moment, and she could feel him fighting for equilibrium through spikes of outrage. “Bad way to step out of the limelight, Slayer,” he managed finally, tightly. “You’re pretty well-known in these parts.”

/God, you’re cute./ He’d always frame it as looking out for her, but right now he just really, really wanted her all to himself. She could forgive him for that, since to be fair, she kind of wanted the same thing. A break. And he was right. If she didn’t get away, she’d get sucked back in all to easily. “Good point. Somewhere else with a beach, though. I like being close to beaches.”

He relaxed slightly. “Gotta be a place with glass doors facing the water, then, and not east or west. Somewhere I can watch you.”

She lifted an eyebrow, impressed with his off-the-cuff planning. “You wanna watch me sunbathe?”

His voice went breathy. “Bloody hell yes. And have you come in smelling like sunlight, all hot and slick…”

“This sounds like the contents of somebody’s personal adult movie catalog.”

His voice went wary. “You’ve starred in some X-rated dreams, Slayer, and you know it. All of ‘em, to be honest. Can’t blame a bloke for wantin’ to bring a few to life.”

She moved a little closer. She hadn’t meant to ask, but… “And last night was…”

His hands clamped down, hard, on her upper arms. Dragged her in against him. He was vibrating, the surge of energy blasting through him to thunder through her as well. “You know damn well what that one was. Bleedin’ number one. Christ, Love, that was the one I could scarce let myself dare to imagine.”

She slid her hand along the nape of his neck, into his hair. “I could tell.”

His forehead fell to hers. “That bloody obvious, was I?”

“It was kind of hot.” She smiled. “We’ll work on the beach house one, too. I don’t mind being your porn star, as long as I can reap the benefits.”

He groaned. “Oh, you’ll reap, Love. Bloody hell, there’ll be all the fertile reaping and threshing you want.”

She scoffed. “You can make anything sound dirty. I don’t even know what that was supposed to mean, but I’m sure it was all wrong.”

He shrugged a little. “Depends. People used to shag in the fields to ensure a good crop…”

“No they didn’t!”

“Yeah, they bloody well did. Now people have riots on May Day. I always thought if they just got back to shaggin’, they’d not have the energy to get into fights with bobbies.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “You think everything would be solved by more sex.”

“Worked for us, yeah?”

He kind of had a point. Only not. “We made things worse with sex,” she corrected. “We had to figure out what was wrong and make it right, first, before the equation worked out the way you’re saying.”

“Yeah, well…” He didn’t dispute that. “Still was damn good sex.”

She was not about to argue that point. “And here we are today.” /Sex even better, with bonus less fighting, and batteries included!/ “But…” She leaned back to look him in the eye. “We’re going to have to figure out how to do it a little less often while Dawn’s around.”

“Bugger.”

She grinned again. “Plus, boat full of part-demons…”

“Can’t be fucked to make things easier on _their_ sensibilities.”

She blinked at the expression. “British people are so weird.”

“Will try to restrain myself for the Niblet, though.” His eyes narrowed at her. “Fair warning, pet. We find us a place with a beach and the windows I was talkin’ about, and all bets are off. Bit’ll just have to cover her ears.”

/Note to self to find a place with some kind of mother-in-law cabin./ “She’s gonna be so happy to get away from us and get back to school…”

“That’s what you want, innit?”

His querying glance was filled with curiosity. And, really, he had a point. If Dawn went back to Berkeley voluntarily, life would be so much easier than fighting with her over it. Because right now, all Dawn wanted to do was stay close, renew acquaintances with Spike, not let him out of her sight. Which, while Buffy understood that motivation, it would mess up her sister’s life if she put everything on hold just to soak up excess available Spikeness for the next year or whatever. 

Buffy knew firsthand how hard it was to regain momentum if you lost your acceptance to school. Sometimes you never did, and then your window closed, and then…

If being near Spike was Dawn’s main deal-breaker, maybe they could move closer to Berkeley or something. Though, most of the beaches there faced west, which kind of screwed up the sunbathing plan for at least part of the day. “Yeah, it is what I want.”

“Then I guess, no holds barred. Shag till she runs away back to uni like her hair’s on fire.”

As plans went, it wasn’t the worst one. /Of course, first we have to make sure she fits in the buildings./

Problem number seven of however many. Problem one being getting Dawn onto the boat, first, with all her stuff. 

They watched the light slowly eke out of the sky with approaching sunset, and waited for their go-time.

***

The plan actually went off without a hitch, which was unexpected, considering their track-record. They got back to Dawn within approximately forty minutes, found her waiting for them with the bus all ready to go (she’d even swept it out and straightened things up!), and turned right around to head back toward the apartment without incident. They abandoned the purloined motorcycle about a half-mile up the road from the turnout, on its side in a little copse of bushes, wiped clean of fingerprints so that Buffy couldn’t be implicated in its quiet removal. Spike even left the ignition ring sitting nicely on top of the gas cap for someone to replace if they wanted to. 

From there it was very quick work to load their belongings onto the bus. They piled the boxes and two or so bags into the seats lining the sides amongst their dwindling food supplies, and headed out from the apartment within about twenty minutes with Dawn waving a sad little goodbye toward the building, looking regretful that she couldn’t go inside to make her farewells in person. “Was it the same?” she asked Buffy as Spike pulled off the curb.

Buffy avoided Spike’s eye as she answered. “Yeah, pretty much. Andrew’s using your room. Mia’s got mine, so I think the bedrooms are a little different, but the living room hasn’t changed much…”

Dawn wrinkled her nose. “Ugh. I bet there’s, like, D&D posters and _Star Wars_ stuff all over in there. Remember that one Han Solo toy he practically slept with?”

“I really wasn’t paying attention to Andrew’s sleeping arrangements,” she answered honestly.

Spike made a derisive noise from the driver’s seat as they headed for the port. “Surprised it wasn’t that limited-edition job he and his mates had down in that bloody basement of theirs. The one with the helmet. Figured he’d’ve saved that one from the hellmouth if nothin’ else.”

Buffy turned back to stare at her guy. “When did you spend enough time down there to make a list of their stupid Darth Vaders or whatever?”

Spike had the grace to look mildly uncomfortable. “Wanted that Warren prat to help me figure out was the chip still working. After… you know. Figured he could manage it, bein’ he was good enough with electronics to build the bot.” He shrunk a little into himself at her continued regard, new uncertainty flooding the claim, followed by ridiculous bravado. “An’ anyway, it wasn’t Darth Vader. I saw the original bloody movie when it first came out in ’77; right before I did Nikki Wood. This was another sort. The Bounty Hunter, from the second film.”

Sometimes Spike was just… so Spike he drove her insane. “You’re such a dope,” she managed finally, because what the hell else was there to say?

“Yeah, well… Made sense at the time.” And she felt his relief; as if he’d thought she was going to retroactively slap him or something. 

Conflicting emotions were just the order of the day sometimes when you were in a serious long-term relationship with an ex-enemy-cum-ambivalent-ally, right? Lot of water under the bridge and all that crap. Ugh. 

“We just gonna leave the bus down there on the harbor for him to pick up, is it?” Spike broke into her thoughts, far too casually. 

Right. Moving on. “Yeah, he, uh, will detail someone to drive it back up to Scotland once he gets back tomorrow or whatever. I’ll call him and let him know where we hid the keys.”

“Brilliant.” 

Another silence fell as they curvetted through occasional nighttime traffic toward Civitavecchia, Dawn watching them with clear uncertainty and Spike filling her with rising discomfort. Finally, just when she was about to speak, he broke the silence first. “I just needed to know, yeah? If it was on the blink or not. What the bloody hell was goin’ on. When I hit you and nothin’ happened I thought I was free, but that turned out to be a bust…” 

She felt a strange swoop in her belly. Of course, back then if he thought the chip wasn’t working, he’d have gone back to hunting. No reason he wouldn’t. He’d been starving, rapacious and lusting, dying for something real; like person on a court-ordered stint at OA who’d just ended their time and been waved in front of a banquet of cake. Except… this was a person who needed cake to live, and had been living instead on scraps of dried frosting licked from the bottom of the plate for a year; of _course_ he had…

And yet, weirdly, what she was getting from him right now wasn’t memories of regret for a hunt gone sour. Just rueful acknowledgment, which was… 

His eyes glanced back at her in the dark, knowing. “Did try to go right back,” he answered the unspoken question softly. “Didn’t take. Had to talk myself up to it. Looked at the girl, standin’ there lookin’ terrified, and all I could see was your face. The disappointment on it; and for God’s sake, Buffy… For all I was desperate, for all I was so mad for it, starvin’ and dyin’ for what was right there in front of me, pulsin’ away…” Wonder flooded his face, through the link between them, to light her bones. “Still to this day I dunno if I’d’ve done it, could I have. Might just barely have managed catch-and-release, if that.” 

/What?/

He winced; an expression that lanced through her, one made up of guilt and shame and a thousand other fleeting emotions. Broken self-image and old desperation and fear and… Need. Need for her to _see_ him. See what he had been becoming, even then. “Bloody dangerous, that. You’d’ve found out eventually, from someone, just the same as you did with The First. Put me down like a rabid dog. But I just…” He shrugged a little sadly, his old conflict a spear in her heart. “Anyway, didn’t matter, since the damn thing was still working. So yeah. Went to the prat and asked him to figure it out for me. Then went to you to find out why. And you know how that ended up.”

/With us naked underneath a broken house. And everything that followed. Because somehow getting my dangerous demon back made me hot as hell. Gee, I wonder why./ Closing her eyes for a minute so that she could get her voice under control, Buffy pulled in a shallow breath, held it. His emotions were swamping her, for one thing; the ebb and flow and riptides of them; prayers and terrors, longings and fears. Even after all these years. “I get it,” she managed, finally, and let out the breath. “And I’m glad… for you, that you couldn’t, since… you’re right. I wouldn’t understand. Then.” 

They paused at a traffic light, and his eyes found hers. “Do you? Now?”

She fumbled for his hand in the dark. “I do.”

He lifted it to his lips. Kissed her knuckles silently, while that understanding flowed between them.

Behind them in the dark, Dawn’s voice percolated quietly through the cab. “Sometimes I miss when you guys used to just punch each other. It was faster. And more fun to watch.”

Buffy swiveled around, frowning. “When… We didn’t fight in front of you!”

A bright, too-big smirk lit the dark. “I had bedroom windows, Buffy, and you did fight him a lot in the yard. And let’s be real. Most of the time that really just looked a lot like fore…”

“Stop talking, Dawn. Seriously. Like, now.”

In the front seat, Spike was so lost in laughter that he almost crashed the bus.

***

**S:  
**  
The bloody great ‘Fortuna Grata’ was still hanging about when they arrived. It was about a three-hundred-foot cargo vessel; standard enough, if quite battered, but he supposed it must still be seaworthy. The bastards working the thing all seemed to trust it, any road. 

The crew was definitely mixed-demon in cast, and a bit motley in aspect. Took all sorts, Spike guessed. Probably loads of them stayed below till nightfall whenever they made port. As his girls headed up the gangway the manky buggers were already making quick work of loading up the miscellany stored in the coach. “I’ll head back to the overnight car-park yeah? Be back quick enough.”

Buffy turned away from her stern survey of proceedings to catch his eye. “Don’t be gone long, okay? I don’t want to have to start whaling on the crew if they threaten to leave without my vampire. It starts relations off on a bad footing.”

He felt his lips twitch. Christ, he loved her. “I’ll leg it fast. Just keep that twitchy stake-hand in your pocket or summat, you undiplomatic wench.”

“I love it when you talk dirty to me.”

The Niblet made a disgusted sound from off to the one side and above them. “Could you two _please_ try not to flirt _all_ the time? Or at least do it in a more _normal_ way?”

Buffy’s eyes twinkled at him, if her words addressed kid sis. “Better close your ears, Dawn.”

Bit grumbled something to herself about gross old people and wandered a little away from them. Spike grinned and rolled his tongue behind his teeth. “Back soon, luv.”

Buffy seized his lapels, a jag of abrupt arousal flooding through the new, reciprocal blood-link from her into him. Back again in a ricochet of need. “Guh. Better be. And don’t do that. Or I’ll have to have my way with you on these nasty docks before we get on this boat, because I think privacy? Kind of not a thing on a deal like that, and I don’t know how long this voyage thing is gonna be.”

His flesh shivered a bit as the tugging she was giving him made the leather of the duster collar tighten around his neck, press on the mark of claim she’d made on him. /Fuck./ “Probably, ah, four, five days out to the Atlantic, pet, and another week to cross it…” Her eyes flared at him. And sodding Christ, he could smell her arousal, feel it boiling in the blood between them. Hell, he could _feel_ it swelling between her thighs now, with this new dimension added to the bond, and to fucking _hell_ with the bloody coach. They could come find it here. “Never thought you had much problem with pryin’ eyes,” he managed, hoarse.

Her voice was taut, gaze intently undressing him where he stood. “I have a problem with Dawnie eyes.”

/Bloody fuck./ She was going to be the death of him, someday. “You sayin’ you want me to try to make it back before we sail, Slayer? Break a few bricks on the quay before we cast off?”

Her eyes flickered to the walls of the buildings behind him, and she released his collar with clear reluctance. “Hurry.”

Her discipline was impressive, considering he had more or less forgotten everything else that mattered in the moment. Driving wasn’t in it. Driving _away_ from her was certainly not in the cards. “Bloody hell, luv…”

Her hand slid up, cupped his cheek, because she could feel him too. “If we have to, whatsitcalled? Cast off before we get a chance, we’ll find somewhere.” And the promise in her eyes burned in him like fire. “It’s a big boat, right?”

Images sizzled in his mind—with Surround Sound—of having her between cargo containers, her cries echoing off of cavernous metal, and he drew in a sharp breath. “Bloody fuck.”

“Welcome to the ‘Fortuna Grata’. You must be the Slayer’s giant friend…”

The captain’s voice penetrated the haze, and Buffy turned away from Spike, shifting to all-business as she strode to meet the Lister. Spike remained where he was, bereft of her heat and trembling from head to toe as the aftereffects of claim and the need to own and be owned near drove him to his knees. /Bloody, bloody fuck…/ 

“Ah, Slayer. Let me give you a tour.” A short pause. “Is, ah, the vampire…”

“He has to take the bus over to that parking area over there, what was it? A half-mile away? He’ll be back soon.”

/Nothin’ like a nice nighttime jog to burn off the libido. If you can get your soddin’ legs to work./

“Well…” The Lister’s voice rose, pitched to reach Spike’s ears. “Make it snappy. Got to get out of here. Want to make Florence before dawn.”

“Yeah.” Kicking himself into gear, Spike managed to turn, tear himself away, though it felt like he was stretching an unseen umbilicus to breaking between himself and the Slayer, like to tear it. Christ, he was owned. /And you begged for it. So buck up and do what’s needful, and you’ll be back before too long has passed, you sodding nancy./

Still, he had to take a moment to breathe long gulps of unnecessary air as he sat behind the hateful wheel of the coach where he’d spent the last several fucking days perched and driving, and yeah, he’d be bloody glad to see the last of the thing. Yet it felt like a sin to walk away from Buffy, and hell. It had never felt like this with Dru. Never felt like… Like he was leaving a part of himself behind, tearing out his own sodding guts to consciously put distance between them. /Bloody fuck./ 

Turning on the bus took pointed effort. The wheel, moreso. By the time he was a few hundred yards away he was smoking like a fiend, and by the time he’d parked the fucking thing, hidden the key, and was turned back toward her it felt like the thing that lay between them was stretched taut and friable and he was meant to come back before it broke, because he was too far from where he belonged, and hell if that should ever happen; and just, fuck, was this what it was like to have a double-bonding? 

No wonder no sire ever stood for it with their get. They’d sooner dust. Course, with Buffy it wasn’t all that different than how he’d always felt, when you got down to brass tacks; only this was a thing of the blood, too, now. Undeniable, and he broke, unconsciously, into a run as he turned back toward the docks. 

No doubt no other vampire would feel what he felt by it, he thought as he made tracks back to his blood-home. This wasn’t like being claimed by a sire. Once you weren’t a fledge anymore you could be miles from your sire and be fine. Linked forever, sure, but fine. This was… /Well, it goes both ways, for one./ And yet… for him, paradoxically, it felt freeing. For all the weight of the double-bonding, he felt lighter than he had ever felt, as if some terrible burden had been lifted, one he’d carried on his own for years. His whole existence, perhaps, in a way, but especially since he’d first fallen for Buffy. 

Drusilla had freed him from his human fears and strictures… and bound him to blood and line. Buffy… Buffy had freed him from the latter, and given him back to himself. But he had long since given himself to her, and in giving him this… she had done something no one else had ever done for him. She had closed the circle. 

He had always known the rules. With Dru, and with Buffy, before. Draw blood, but never say, ‘Mine’. Say, ‘I’m yours’ instead, and the other got to say, ‘Mine’ if she ever wished to do so. Dru had done it, for a while, but he had never gotten to close that circle. Not in a million years would he have been permitted to take that which belonged to another. And Buffy…

Buffy had never _chosen_ him. Never claimed him when she’d drawn his blood, no matter how many times he’d offered himself on a platter, said, ‘Yours’ with his blood between them, a shining gift. All of his being, laid bare and pulsing, cast aside as nothing. She’d never wanted it. Not before. Would never have done; not if he begged. Hell, he _had_ begged. All he’d ever wanted; to serve her, in every way, and give himself over utterly. 

Now…

She had taken him on, and willing. Not only had she given herself to him, let him say, ‘Mine’… but she had chosen him to be hers. And to be anchored again in that way, Claimed…

Christ, he had never felt so free.

He probably made that half-mile in record time, jogged back up and onto the gangplank before they’d really had a moment to miss him. He wondered if Buffy had felt his distance-distress as he rejoined them, prayed she wouldn’t make a big thing of it if she had, make him feel the soft sodding fool for it… but she only reached out to reclaim his hand as he joined them and nodded toward the far end of the ship. 

It was worrying, how relieved he felt to be back in contact with her. But that was the thing. He was rooted now. She rooted him. In all ways, she was home. Not that she hadn’t been already, to his bloody soft demon heart, to his composite mind, his nancy fucking soul… but now she was also home to his blood as well; to all that gave him life, and being. Every part of him found solace and safety here, with her. There was nothing uncertain anymore here. Only conviction. 

Of course he wouldn’t want to stray far. This was where he _belonged_.

“Our sort of area’s s’posed to be down there, at the back of the ship…”

“The stern,” the captain corrected with a boatman’s standard disdain for landsmen’s talk.

“Stern. Sure. We haven’t seen it yet. We can go down if you wanna. It’s right by where they built the, you know, deal for Dawn…”

The Niblet blushed. “At least it’s private. Sort of.”

Concerned at her expression, Spike dragged his attention over to follow their gazes, and, well. The facilities the crew had constructed for their resident giant’s stay… functional, he supposed. He would’ve preferred they allow his Bit a hair more privacy, but he understood that sort of thing to be tough to come by on a ship, so he supposed they’d rather done the best they could under the circumstances, and considering the time constraints.

The monstrosity was constructed off to one side of the deck, under an overhanging section of main cabin where a bit of decking narrowed to a mere catwalk. Seemed they’d built a sort of jutting, double-thick pallet-platform to dangle out over the water—sensible enough, he supposed—and then built over it what could be described as more or less a lean-to. The thing clung to the walls of the nearest cabin like a bloody limpet, and was clamped to the sides of the thick fiberglass with ship’s cables. 

The whole sodding outhouse was constructed entirely out of pallets, but at least they’d been decent enough to plug the damn holes with extra boards and the like. He supposed none of the lot round here could manage to get a peep in, though he thought he might haunt the place just in case. He didn’t altogether trust these sods. One wall in its entirety was made to work as a doorway into the thing; a good twelve feet high by four wide. The Niblet would have to double up a bit to get in and out, but she’d manage. And inside… well. There was a bit of bench and a hole. 

It was a head. 

“All ships had this sort of… uh, arrangement,” the Lister was telling the ladies a bit anxiously as Spike pulled his head out. “Up till they figured out how to do holding tanks and the rest of modern ship’s plumbing; though usually they didn’t have walls. You just sat…”

“Ugh!”

Spike grinned broadly at their horrified expressions. “‘S why they used to call it ‘the head’, luv. Because it used to always be up at the bows of the ship, where the waves would break inside and wash ‘em clean.” He shot his girls each an impartial grin. “Ever tell you how grateful I am I missed those days… and that I don’t commonly have this little problem? Hear it was a bit uncomfortable to have a wave come up and…” He swung his hand about, made a tickling motion with his fingers. 

“Oh, wow…” Buffy looked horrified. Dawn just gaped at him.

“Bit of a bidet for the bums of the sailors as didn’t have good hygiene, yeah?” he reasoned blandly.

Niblet finally broke through her screen of awed horror to exclaim, “Oh my God, you’re so gross…”

“To be fair,” the Lister broke in, “that only usually happened when there was a storm. And this one’s on a much bigger ship. You probably won’t have that happen, since you’re so high above the waves…” He clammed up quick at Dawn’s mortified expression. “Anyway, it should do. Tried to make it private… No one from the crew ever comes around this side of the cabin since there’s no reason for it, and there’s a good-sized hatch near here that goes down below on the same side as the cabin we’ve got for you, which is an area of the cargo hold we’ve sectioned off…” He led them swiftly away from the modified outhouse toward said hatch and down into the bowels of the ship, before the Bit could explode into flames.

The area they’d been told off to use as a cabin in the hold was homey enough, he supposed. And, to be fair, the Lister and his folk really had done their best, considering the information he’d been given, which had been, to wit: three passengers, relationships between which, unspecified. One, giant, not cabin-sized. One Slayer, one vampire, relations between which, most demons would extrapolate, would be at best, uneasily-allied. So.

They’d be bedding down, all together, cozy-like, directly next to the spot where all their kit had been webbed in against the nearest cargo containers. An overlarge sleeping-pallet had been laid out and nicely bolted-down for Dawn against a stable-enough-seeming stack of cargo to one side… and bunks had been set up, one each, for himself and Buffy, nice as you please, against the bloody hull, because they had been fucking lackwits and hadn’t thought to inform the goddamn Lister that they’d only need the one bed. /Teach us not to speak up. Sodding fucking oversight number one./ “Bloody hell. Outsmarted ourselves there.”

Buffy had tensed beside him on first sight, breath catching. She didn’t like the prospect any more than he did, which was at least nice to know. “We’ll figure something out,” she answered, but her voice was taut. 

Hearing their undertones, the Lister looked abruptly concerned. “Is something wrong?” He looked around at the setup, clearly worried. “Did you want to be housed separately from your giant? Or is it…” 

Buffy squared her shoulders. “No, it’s not that.” 

/No. It’s what buggering happens when you’re so bleeding used to something you don’t think to mention it. Because you think it’s fucking obvious as hell, even though no one in their right sodding minds in the entire demonic universe would _dare_ to presume…/ Not to a Slayer; or even most vamps. Not if they wanted to leave the conversation with their heads still attached. 

“We just forgot to mention that we only needed one bed for me and Spike. But it’s fine. We’ll just… pull the mattresses onto the floor or something. No big.”

The Lister jerked back as if she’d burned him. Stared at them in utter shock. “You’re a _Slayer!”_ he hissed, utterly horrified.

Spike felt his lips turn up in sardonic amusement. /Should have expected that reaction, I suppose./ He felt the insane urge to light up in the face of the bloke’s horrified disgust.

Beside him, Buffy tilted her head a little in what Spike was beginning to recognize as a habit picked up in mimicry of him. It made his dead heart flutter a little, truth be told. “Is this gonna be, like, a big problem for you?”

The pale eyes flitted to Spike and back, and now the sod was gaping. “I just… I mean…” And then everything in the skeletal visage settled into sunken lines which seemed to land somewhere between judgmental and awed. “That’s… twisted.”

Spike scoffed. _“Vampire.”_ He really wanted that fag about now.

“Alright. Okay, but…” His eyes jerked back to look Spike up and down. Slid over to Buffy, blinking. “Still, that’s kind of… Are you… I mean… You _are_ still a Slayer, right?”

/Now there’s a complicated fucking question./ Spike turned his eyes to his love and waited, wondering just exactly how she was going to field that one. 

His heart swelled with pride when she merely returned the wanker’s gaze with calm self-acceptance. “It isn’t something that just goes away. But you do this for long enough, you find out sometimes you have a little more in common with some other part-demons than you thought.”

“With some…” The Lister jerked again, clearly floored by her self-classification. “Yeah. Uh. Wow. Okay… I’m gonna go… up topside again. Got some work to do. On deck. To get us underway. I’ll, uh, check in with you once we’re… on the move…” He shook himself like he was a dog flinging water off his fur. “Feel free to, you know, move around the ship. Just stay out of the crew’s way and…” His eyes fell to them and he shook his head again, obviously having the hell of a time wrapping his brain around the way they’d crossed the streams of reality and that. Unimaginative git. 

“Maybe try not to think about it?” Dawn offered sweetly from her spot on the floor. “Most of our friends stuck with that method till they got numb.”

The Lister nodded dumbly as he headed for the ladder, looking poleaxed. 

/Gonna be a problem, that one./ 

Their bit of cargo hold echoed in the silence as his ringing footsteps receded. Spike waited till he had vanished through the hatch before speaking up. “Well, either he just got hope for the future, or he’s gonna try to toss us overboard some night mid-Atlantic because we’ve upset his worldview too much.”

Buffy shrugged nonchalantly at his shoulder. “Nothing new there.” She wasn’t fooling Spike, but it would help Dawn, which he supposed was the point. He watched as she pulled out her phone. “Amazingly I have service down here in this can. Where’d you hide those keys? I’ll text Andrew before we pull out of port.”

Christ, he loved her. The way she always picked up the pieces, faced the future, and just went on living her life. She was a fucking marvel.

Her eyes rose to his as she dialed the number, lit. And, feeling his regard, she smiled. 

And none of that other shit mattered. None of it.

***  
  
  
  
  
  
HEE!  
  
It always throws everyone, LOL.  
  
And... on the road again.  
Or, boat  
  
  
  



	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... a number of interesting things happen in the next few segments, in my humble opinion. Hehe. I had a good deal of fun filling in the time spent on this portion of the "road"-trip. (Sea-trip?)
> 
> Hope you all enjoy with me.

**B:  
**

They were five days at sea on the Mediterranean alone, stopping in at ports all over the place between Italy and Gibraltar. Buffy watched the daytime coastline slide by with Dawn, stood with Spike during the nights under the moon and an incredible array of stars... and as each mile passed, felt a little more weight slide off of her shoulders, a little more wonder steal over her personal universe. A little more awe just in the beauty of the world, a little more simple, slow appreciation of life. 

Sometimes, if the ports they called in at were nighttime stops, they toyed with the idea of slipping away from the ship for what Spike called ‘a quick spot of tourism’… but though the captain seemed more or less relaxed around them, had even sent them a sailor of some indeterminate part-demon aspect to help them bolt their combined bedding to the floor, it seemed a little too much of a risk to take. They didn’t want him to just sail off without them and leave then stranded because they freaked him out, so they restrained themselves, and saw no ports except from the rails. 

They did, however, scope for nice spots that might do for future residences. “Andalusia has nice beaches,” Spike told her one evening as the sun set behind the ship, and was he fishing? “Spanish architecture. Seem to remember you liked that when we were in Hell-A. Might feel a bit like a home away from home.”

Dawn piped in from where she stood a little to one side. “Seriously, what’s the obsession with beaches? It’s not like you can hang out on ‘em, Spike. At least, not in the daytime when they’re actually fun.”

Spike grinned broadly. “Nothin’ like a nice moonlit swim, Niblet. And you know big sis will enjoy the daylight hours enough for the both of us.”

Dawn passed right over that to stare at him in shock. “You _swim?”_

Spike looked a little offended at that. “Course I bloody swim. I’m a vampire, not a housecat.”

Buffy did her best to stifle a laugh at a sudden mental image of a pissed-off Spike, bitching about having been unceremoniously toppled into a pool while minding his own business hunting for tasty human morsels.

Her restrained giggles earned her a narrow-eyed glare. “What the sodding hell is so funny?”

“Oh, nothing.” But now her mental-Spike was dabbing a wet paw at the offending humans, sopping white hair hanging over his eyes in long, straggling blond curls, and she lost it, turning away from the boat railing to bend over and plant both palms on her thighs.

Spike was watching her in disgust. She could feel his irritation over the claim. It only made her laugh harder, because she would never tell him that he was basically a disgruntled, domesticated, cuddly ocelot or something. Never. He’d kill her in her sleep. 

Thank god he couldn’t actually see her thoughts, or she’d be doomed.

Wiping her eyes, she straightened up, did her best to pull a sober expression over her features, and turned back around to face him. “Sorry. I’m all good now.”

“Mind tellin’ me what that the bloody hell that was all about?”

/Testy, much?/ “Yes, I do,” she informed him cheerfully, and pressed her aching belly against the railing. She was still fighting not to burst out laughing again. Avoiding his eyes was the best way to keep the hilarious mental images from resurfacing.

“I’ll get it out of you later,” he threatened, supreme confidence written all over his voice and stance.

“You’ll try,” she answered blandly, eyes still on the coastline sliding past them. 

Dawn, she realized, was watching her with a weird look on her face. “What?”

Her very large sister jerked her eyes away, but her expression was decidedly misty. “Nothing. I just… don’t remember the last time I heard you laugh like that.”

/Oh./ “I do that a lot now,” she replied very softly, because Dawn needed to know it. Needed to know why. Reached out a hand to touch the oversized arm next to hers on the railing. “You’d be surprised.”

Dawn looked down at the twilit waters below, then slowly turned, with ponderous grace, to grab her and Spike around the shoulders. And bent down, almost double, to kiss Spike right on the top of the head. 

“Bloody hell, Niblet!”

Dawn ignored the irritated protest. “Thank you,” she told him simply, and let them go. Buffy thought she was in tears as she headed back toward the other end of the ship.

“What the sodding…”

“She’s spent a lot of time watching me cry, Spike.”

Realization flooded the bond. “Oh. Oh, hell.” Confusion came next. “Then why the bugger is she crying about it that you’re happy?”

Really, was it that hard? “Because she’s happy, you doof.”

That earned her a poleaxed silence before his next comment. “You women will be the sodding end of me.”

“Just be glad we’re both happy, Spike, since you had a lot to do with it.”

Spike grunted at that. “Sure beats when I made everyone so bleedin’ sad.” Wonder filled his voice as he said it.

And another chip of old pain flecked away.

***

 **S:**  
  
Spike flicked the Zippo open and shut, open and shut with his thumb, thoughts dwelling not on the coast before his eyes but on the past as it and the present bled together. Once, he and Dru had sailed here—or, rather, passed by these shores—on a rather nicer sort of steamer from the Suez to Monaco. No need to be in hiding, then. You always had a few brash young adventurers go missing between ports, what with the drink and swift changes of plan. You just had to time it right. And, well, he had been able to control Dru, keep her to a dip at the trot if necessary. If not… Even today, cruise liners never reported it if some of their staff vanished mid-voyage; went overboard or were trafficked. Bad for business, it was, to let on about it. Sounded rotten on the brochures, so if visiting vamps kept it out of the passengers’ list... 

Dru had been a bit of a flapper, then, and liked to eat the sorts of young men who flocked to her side, lured by the promise in her eyes. And there would always be young men willing to swarm to the come-hither stare of a woman who had no interest in coy modesty; who knew the uses of directness. It was just… in that time, it had been new, and fresh, and fun.

All of Europe had been balls-out entertaining along about then; from the madness of Berlin—men, women, boys and girls of all ages wanting a taste, and everyone in between for that matter, all living large without a single care in the sodding world—all the way back to Merry Old. The parties, and the drink, and no one with the slightest interest in following the old rules. He and his Dark Princess had passed from Germany down to Italy, nipped into Istanbul for a quick nosh at some Constantinople soothsayer she’d wanted to eat because, _"He has the right kind of eyes, he tells me things. Let me have him, my knight,"_ (though how Dru and Miss bloody Edith had known the bugger existed was beyond him, still), and then come back along to Monaco for a spin at the tables before heading home to London again. 

Hell of a trip.

Now, he was here with Buffy; a bit in hiding, on a much less posh vessel, but following the same paths… and there would always be echoes. It made him anxious, sometimes; especially now, when the bond between them was so…

“Hey. What’s up? You’re all edgy.”

He clove to her automatically, and Christ, would he ever do anything less than lose his bones, morph to a willing slave at the sound of her voice? Moth to a bloody flame, he pivoted, his gaze pulled inexorably from his contemplation of the sliding, rocky coastline of—hell, where were they by now? France, most probably. “Nothing. Just… history.”

She stilled. The bond flickered with recognition. “Been here before?” she asked, carefully.

“Yeah.”

“Mm.” 

She could choose not to ask. Let it lie. Give him space. Or she could choose to know him, even if it hurt; in the same way as she had opened up to him… because, unfortunately, their exes lived in uncomfortable intimacy with their current lives. Theirs was not a common relationship when it came to those matters. 

So she drew closer, till her shoulder was even with his. Followed his gaze out over the water. “When?” she asked, curiously.

“The twenties.” He jerked his chin to the ever-darkening northeast. “Came from Germany by way of Istanbul. Got off a bit before here, in Monaco…”

Buffy blinked. “I can see the thing for James Bond now. Didn’t he do something in Monaco?”

“More to do there than gambling, pet, but yeah. Went from there back to London for a spell, then spent a little time in Russia. Dawdled all about the world, really, till the Second War loused it all up for all of us.” He shrugged, passing right over that one. “Fifties was Italy, then by the sixties the US seemed a better bet. Land of opportunity and all that rot, and fuck-all left to do here.” He flicked at the lighter again, barely conscious he was doing it. “So many adrift, confused flower children to eat, other side of the pond…”

Buffy shot him a narrow-eyed look. “Where was Drusilla while you were getting high off of hippies?”

Bloody hell, was she telling him off for being a poor caregiver? “Drugs couldn’t do much worse to her, Buffy,” he defended, and flicked the lighter open once more. Snapped it shut. “She saw blood rains and frogs in the soddin’ sky whether-or, and danced naked under the moon even when she was sober. Didn’t make much bleedin’ difference, did it, who she ate?” He tried to shrug it off, feeling oddly, retroactively guilty. “B’sides; she always had a minion or two about she’d made, an’ I saw to it they took care of her proper.” He sighed and fiddled with the Zippo some more. “Sometimes I needed a soddin’ break, yeah?”

Buffy sighed and covered his hand abruptly with hers. “Oh my God, stop with the lighter. You’re gonna make me nuts.”

Spike’s hand froze mid-flick. Absolutely froze. His thumb went into complete rigor, bent over the lid of the Zippo.

Amazed, he stared down at his own hand, still covered with hers, as if his gaze could penetrate the back of her palm to glare at his own tendons. /Christ, it _can’t_ be…/

Unaware of his dilemma, Buffy went on speaking. “Really, I was mostly just teasing you, so relax.”

Spike felt his shoulders smooth; a paradoxically odd feeling, considering he still couldn’t move his thumb to save his unlife. He tried to shift the bloody thing. Couldn’t twitch it a whit. /Oh, fuck./ “Buffy…”

She had misinterpreted the worry in his eyes. “Seriously, Spike. I was just playing with you. I mean, not that I’m glad you went around nibbling on defenseless high kids, but…”

“Slayer, could you do me a favor and tell me I’m allowed to move my hand?” He was grateful to hear that his voice sounded preternaturally calm as he said it, considering that shock and a mild sense of internal screaming had picked up somewhere within. /A fucking sire-bond. The claim’s the same as a goddamned sire-bond. Jesus fuck…/

“Allowed? What…”

He closed his eyes. Swallowed. Nodded down at her hand where it still covered his. “You told me to stop, Love. Still stopped, yeah? Can’t bloody move till you tell me to leave off doin’ the last thing it is you told me to do…”

She blinked. Slowly lifted her hand away. And stared down at the tableau of his hand, holding the lighter, thumb poised and bent over the lid, caught in the act of flicking it open. “What…”

He cleared his throat. “I never really thought about it. That it’d do all the same things, because I don’t think of you that way. Because you’re not my sire. But I gave you all my loyalty a long bloody time ago, so for all intents and purposes…”

Realization slowly percolated through a green gaze turned hazel with concern. “Oh, crap.”

He closed his eyes. “Powerful fucking weapon there, Slayer.”

“Oh, God, Spike. I didn’t want…” Her voice was shaking.

“Well…” He was a bit hoarse himself. “‘S there now, any road. You wanna release me, pet?” His arm was shaking by now; not from strain, per se, but from the emotional confusion of it all. 

“Oh. Oh, shit. Yeah. God. Put down the lighter, or… You’re… I dunno; free to do whatever you want with it?”

He let out a breath as his thumb abruptly relaxed. With a grunt he swiftly shoved the Zippo back into his inside pocket and, groaning slightly, thrust his fingers through his hair. “Bloody fuck.” Looked around him and, turning, stumbled over to the nearest bench, bolted to the deck. Slumped to sit there, shaking. “Shit.”

He remained there for a long moment, trying to get himself together. Dru had scarcely ever used sire-commands on him. She’d been too mazy for the most part, though when she had, it had been to do the strangest goddamned things to him. She had told him off to stand still in the corner once, with her dollies, a dunce cap of all bloody things on his head, while she made ‘tea’ and went about her day, because he’d displeased her in some fashion or another. Of course, she had forgotten about him, lost in some sodding vision or another, and he’d ended up standing there for the better part of a day and a half, locked in rigor, till she’d finally spotted him there again—possibly only because she’d wanted the company of one of the dolls she’d left with him, or maybe because she’d eventually wondered where the hell he’d got to—and she’d released him, seemingly surprised to find him still there at all. 

She’d made it up to him. Wept with regret, actually, wailed and beat her breast and kissed him until he’d ended up on his knees begging her forgiveness for the unkind words he’d said in spite when she’d finally returned to him. After all, those were just the perils of life with Drusilla; and in truth, he hadn’t held it against her. Wasn’t her fault, after all. 

It was Angelus’ fault. And when that bastard had done it to him… Christ; that had always been worse. Worse by far. When the leader of your nest was also your grandsire and the bloodsire who’d taken over your schooling… Well. 

Angelus had been a harsh taskmaster when it came to teaching him the requirements of a childe of the line of Aurelius, whether the bastard had cared about all that shite or no. After all, the old bent bitch had required _he_ learn it—religious old cunt—and by all that was unholy, Angelus would impress it upon Drusilla’s unfortunate fledgling in turn if it bloody well killed him, and make a proper little Aurelian of William the Bloody. 

_“After all, Willie-Boy,”_ Angelus had said to him more than once while he’d shuddered for days on end in some fucking stress-position that could eventually wear on even a fledgling vamp, _“you may be a piece of shite vampire, but it’s on me to make somethin’ of you. And I will do that, if it means I leave nothing of you in the end. I may not care about the religion. I may not care about its Master, the old bat-faced gobshite… but I care that bein’ of the line keeps us in money, and fine rags, and gets us invites to nice parties up here in the limelight. So you’ll keep a civil tongue in your head about your betters, boyo, you’ll do what you’re told, and you’ll learn… or you’ll feel worse than a nice flogging. Maybe you’ll have some more of my attentions again, and we all know you don’t want that. No? Now, then, attend to me…”_ A little caress of the face, while he shuddered and tried to pull away but couldn’t, locked in place by the bastard’s sire-command. _“…And it’ll all be over soon. Long as you can recite it all back to me like the sweet schoolboy I know ye are. C’mon, lad. Make me proud, and I won’t have to hurt you. Much. And then we can all be friends again, and go have a nice meal.”_

/And people wonder why I’m a sodding atheist at heart; or wish I could be. Between that and the joys of fucking Eton…/ 

Spike closed his eyes again, briefly, to abate the memories. Christ, he was tired of people holding that sort of power over him. 

But there was a reason he’d wanted this. And it wouldn’t always be… like that. Not with Buffy. Who was standing there on the decking across from him, unmoving and clearly terrified by the power she’d been inadvertently given. Who didn’t wanted it, never had even when she might have thought she might, and certainly hadn’t asked for it. Buffy wouldn’t want to use it against him in that way. Would not have done even in their prior incarnation. If she had had it then she would have been horrified by the ins and outs of this part of vampirical blood-law, and eventually disgusted with herself if she had ever fallen to using it through spite. 

Certainly she would not use it against him now. He could trust that… /I can _trust_./ Buffy wouldn’t be… careless with him, or abusive, or casually cruel. Not anymore, not after… She would hold him in her hands and keep him safe, as she had already done when she had held his bond in all but deed already, for the last half a year. This was no different. There were only the logistics. And if there were mistakes, a learning curve… 

Well, then, they’d work on it, and… And it said a lot already that nothing of this sort had occurred as yet, when the thing had been in place for three days. Buffy was no longer in the habit of giving him casual commands; and certainly not without reason. So, they would… manage. /Though, thank Christ it’s now and not… then, when if an accident _had_ happened…/

It would have destroyed them both with the fallout.

“Spike? What do you want me to do? I didn’t know, or I…”

He let out a breath, equally rattled both by her haunted tones and his own bone-deep, physical uncertainty. It was one thing, of course, to know in your mind that you could trust; another entirely to convince your instincts that your physical integrity was safe when you had been trained long and hard and painfully that trust was a fool’s errand. “I know. Could you… come here? Sit with me, Buffy.”

She came. Sat with him. And relaxed a little when he laid his arm behind her on the bench, pulled her in close. And told her a few things about how hard it had been, before; and how much easier he thought it would be, at least, with her. And felt her feel pain for him; for his past, though she struggled not to show him anything like pity, but only empathy and love. 

When she spoke, finally, it was with a sort of firm resolve mixed with uncertainty which, coming from Buffy Summers, melted his heart, and could surely move mountains. “I’ll try to watch what I say. I guess I’ll have to… frame things… not as… what’re they called? Directives?”

He nodded slowly, watching her with interest and a heart that, if it could begin beating again, would already have done. Christ, this woman. 

“I mean, not even jokingly. Jeez…” She squeezed her eyes shut, almost comical in her concern. “I’m gonna have to be careful in bed!”

He couldn’t help it. His unneeded breath escaped him in a burst of unexpected laughter. He hadn’t even _thought_ of that; and damned if it didn’t make him feel lighter. “Oh, bloody hell. That’s an unfair advantage I hadn’t sodding considered!”

She turned to him, lifted an eyebrow in surprise. “You didn’t?” And then she actually had the gall to look disappointed in him. “I mean, okay. That was the _first_ thing I thought of.”

Leaning back, he eyed her in no small amusement, and not a little speculation. “Naughty girl.”

“Okay, well, maybe not the _very_ first thing,” she defended, “but it was in the top three… What?”

He just shook his head, dissolving now into chuckles. “Christ, Buffy, I love you.”

Everything really was going to be alright.

***

 **B:**  
  
Buffy rummaged in the bag, muttering to herself. It was definitely in the stuff they’d brought from Scotland, not in the piles of webbed boxes and crap from Rome. Not that she had dug them out at all in the last year, since it had hurt too damned much to look at them, but she for sure would have kept them near to her, right? She would've taken them with her when they moved up to the UK, so it had to be in…

“What’re you lookin’ for, pet?”

“Nothing important, really.” Shoving a blouse impatiently aside, she sat back on her heels and frowned. Maybe it was in the other duffel. Hard to tell, since they had packed so damned fast when they'd bailed out of the castle, and she hadn't exactly rummaged through all the stuff she had never unpacked in the first place, but for sure they had to be in here somewhere, right?

She needed a damn flashlight. The low light in this tank of a hold was very much not helping her in her quest. /Looking for a dark object in the dark recesses of a dark bag at night. Good call, Buffy./

Her entire being fizzed pleasantly, the envelope of her flesh coming alert to Spike's presence as he squatted behind her; and then one long, leather-clad arm darted in past her to tug something out of the bag. “This what you’re hopin’ to find?”

She didn’t blush as she snatched it back, just shot him an absent, mildly-distracted glare and shoved the long, cool, glass object back into its nest of clothes. “Not particularly.” Thank god Dawn was up on deck right now, though, dammit.

A short silence as she contemplated the interior of the duffel, then, “Was that what it looked like?”

Rolling her eyes, she considered elbowing him hard right in his washboard abs. “Yes, and it was my faithful companion for the whole year I spent missing you, alright?” /Could’ve used it the year before that, too./ “But I don’t need it anymore now you’re around. What I _do_ need to find is a little dark-green velvet bag, so if you see one with your enhanced vampire eyeballs…”

“It’s… decorative. Just didn’t figure you’d need it to be so pretty to get the job done.”

He wasn’t going to let it go, was he? “It… has other special functions you can’t get from the standard ones,” she snapped, because memory was a bitch. “And look. If you’re not gonna be helpful…”

“Like what?” he queried, clearly fascinated.

/Oh my _God_ , Spike./ “You can put it in the refrigerator, okay?”

He sat back, hands falling to his knees. 

She wasn’t going to blush. She was so past blushing on these matters. “You’re going to say something smug, aren’t you?”

He surprised her when he didn’t. Instead he just lightly brushed the back of her neck with two fingers, then leaned forward again to fish around in the duffel. In seconds he’d come up with the little velvet item she’d been trying to locate for the past ten minutes. “This the one?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” She pushed herself to her feet. “Can you zip that up? I don’t need comments from Dawnie about glass dildos. You’re bad enough.”

He huffed out a breath as he complied. “I was just curious.” He jerked his chin toward the tiny container she now held. “Do I get to see what’s in there?”

She shrugged as she turned for the ladder that led up to the deck. “If you want. I saved a few things from a former life. It’s time to let one of them go.”

He trailed her as she gained the catwalk, through the hatch, then up the next ladder to the main deck. When they made the rail, maintaining their footing on the lightly pitching deck, Buffy drew in a deep breath of the sultry nighttime air all around them, heavy with spray. Then, with a decisive nod, she loosened the drawstrings of the little velvet bag and upended it. 

Three items fell out into her palm. A Black Hills gold band, wrought with roses and leaves. A heavy silver ring with a skull on it. And a small claddagh ring. 

Buffy heard Spike’s quick inhale of recognition. Without looking at him, Buffy passed him the first two rings. “Can you hold yours and Mom’s?”

Wordless, he held out his hand to take the gold ring and the heavy one.

Pensive, Buffy held up the claddagh. Eyed it for a moment, remembering it reappearing on her dresser after she had finally let it go. Having been unable, in her confusion, to cast it aside again; not after the near-loss, and the bite she hadn’t known was a claim, and prom, and her then-boyfriend leaving her to her life to disappear to LA. Her with her broken heart, and wondering if any of it had been worth the massive cost. /But I made it be. Because it _had_ to be./

Sighing, she shook her head for all of the foolishness of past self. Then, with a little shrug, drew back her arm and pitched the ring hard over the rail into the Mediterranean. “Find peace,” she whispered as it flashed, briefly, under the moon. The sentiment was no longer required for the person she had once been, but she did hope it would come for the person who had given it to her. She had already long since said goodbye to all the rest.

As the glint vanished into the ether she turned to Spike, smiled as she took his ring and her mother’s back from his hand. Gave his fingers a little squeeze as she did so, then moved to lean back against him. “It’s a nice night, huh?” /Some things _are_ worth it. Worth _any_ cost. And have never cost me as much, to give me so much more./

Spike unfroze around her. “Yeah,” he whispered, then, hesitantly… “I didn’t know you’d kept it.”

/I know./ He would never have believed it of her. “Yeah, well… I would never have admitted it to myself, much less you, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away, so…”

He remained mostly still. She could feel his awe. “You saved it.” 

“Yeah.” So little time to decide what to save, in those few moments. The ‘just in case’ stuff. Just what they could carry; what they could fit on the bus. Documents, of course. Birth certificates and IDs and things of that nature. A change or two of clothes. Beyond that…

Dawn had saved a couple of journals—including one Buffy knew for a fact had been a gift from Spike—and a necklace from Tara. Mom’s earrings. Xander had saved only two things; his unused wedding ring, and a little car from the Game of Life. Because of Anya. Beyond that he had of course kept the things Anya had brought along. Willow had saved one of Tara’s dresses—the spring-green, velvet one—and some witchy things that were particularly special. Aside from the necessary documents and things, they had all saved a few sentimental items.

Buffy had gone back and forth on a hell of a lot, and had eventually written most of it off as frivolous. Because she’d needed to be the one to lead by example, and the sentimental took up too much space. And so she had lost it all. Mr. Gordo. Her Swan Lake music box. Her Class Protector umbrella, though now she really regretted not grabbing that one. 

But she had had to bring the rings. 

_Had_ to. /My life story is in those rings./ 

Smiling a little, she folded her hand tight around Mom’s and the one Spike had given her, and she pressed her back to his chest, her cheek to his jaw. “You think I was gonna let it go?”

“I love you, Buffy.”

“I know you do.” She smiled, turned, kissed him. “But thanks for saying it.”

His hand folded cool and tight around hers, around the precious cargo she held, as he joined her in the kiss. 

***

 **S:**  
  
Lying against her in the night, his nose in Buffy’s hair, he waited. Waited until he was certain, by the heavy and stertorous sounds of giant breathing, by the slow, steady rhythm of a giant heart, and by the familiar mumbles she made, that Dawn was asleep. He was well-versed, after all. He had hugged her till she slept, god knew, throughout nearly five bloody awful, long months together in mutual mourning. Whatever her size, Spike knew what his Bit sounded like when she pretended to sleep versus when she was truly out.

Once the coast was clear he snuggled a bit closer to Buffy, if that were at all possible. “Ask you a question, Love?” he murmured into his mate’s lovely, warm ear, and smoothed a few tendrils of her perfect hair back behind it to expose the low, murmured route to his probably damned curiosity.

“Mmm?” She was half-asleep herself, nestled down in his arms, and he ought to just let it be, but… 

It burst out of him despite his best efforts. “It’s only… If you were keeping the bloody thing in the fridge, how in seven hells did Dawn never see it?”

Buffy came fully awake. He expected her to roll her eyes at him for his demonic prying, or for the den of iniquity inside his gourd. What he didn’t expect was silence, and finally a weary sigh. “I didn't. I had to pick my moments,” she answered, and there was a grim note in her voice as she pronounced it that bespoke a lot of strain, a lot of waiting, and a vast well of frustration.

/Oh, Love./ “I’m sorry,” he heard himself whisper. What the hell could he say? /My fault, in so many sodding ways. Made her imprint on a certain thing to get off, then made her go without like a numpty while I fucked off in LA, thinking I was helping in some idiot way or other./ Not that he’d been in much better straits. He had practically had to put his own hand in the bloody microwave to manage, but still. He could make do by warming something—a cuppa or what have you—and then cuddling it a bit, and hey presto. 

Sounded like his love had had a bit of a harder road. 

Buffy absolved him with a tiny shake of her head, felt merely by the vibration of it where her cheek lay cradled against the forearm he had spread beneath her. “It’s alright. It wasn’t… all you. Though…” A faint smile touched her voice before he could wince. “To be fair, it was _mostly_ you.” 

Spike wasn’t entirely sure if that was better or worse, considering. Despite her earlier performance upstairs on deck, and feeling fully secure in the fact that she had found what she enjoyed with him, they both knew where the imprinting had begun. Not that it mattered in the long run. He had been who she had been wanting. Who she had been missing. And he had deprived her of himself.

“And anyway, it was better than that year after us. At least I _had_ it. Before I stumbled on what worked…” A faint, rueful smile touched her voice. _“That_ was a long year. Might explain some of my driven thing, and that resting bitch-face I had going on.”

/Christ./ “For what it’s worth, I don’t remember anything of the sort. I remember a woman who’d come into her own. A lot less bitchy than when you were getting shagged on the regular.”

“Yeah, well…” With a sigh, she shifted in his arms. “Anyway, don’t worry. Pierre is retired…”

 _“Pierre?”_ he exclaimed, momentarily stunned.

“Hard as a rock?”

“Oh, bloody hell.” He dissolved for a moment into startled chuckles, stomach weak from it.

“Though, if you ever decide to go on a long trip or something…”

His arms tightened automatically around her waist, ratcheting her closer to him.

She kissed the tender flesh of his inner arm, all reassurance. “Pierre served a dual purpose, you know.” And he felt her lips crease in a teasing smile against the sensitive flesh there.

“Oh, yeah?” he inquired gamely around the lump in his throat. 

“Gets your hand chilly too.” She shrugged slightly. “Otherwise, I think my brain couldn’t give my body permission to really let go, if that makes sense.”

/Christ./ She was saying if she imagined she was doing a sodding human she couldn’t get off anymore; or at least, not properly. Which made sense, he supposed, considering how careful she’d had to be in the past.

“I’d think of your voice,” she told him softly, and the backs of her nails stroked now, slowly up and down the thin flesh over the bones of his arm. “Telling me it was okay. I’d imagine that you were there. Giving me permission, even though you didn’t believe me. Even though I’d failed you, and you were gone.” He heard the lump in her throat as well, felt the tears threaten in his own eyes. “It was the only way I could…”

/Oh, bloody hell, Spike, you fucking wanker./

“Then, after I…” She cut off, voice thick, did not finish. And her hand stalled in its movements. Spike felt the wave of remembered grief wrack her, and knew. 

She’d given in, in her extreme of need, called up his memory… and then, thinking him dead and gone to dust, let the fullness of that painful recollection destroy her over and over again. /I did that to you, Buffy, staying away. Christ, how can I ever make it up to you save to tell you I’ll bloody well never leave you alone again?/

She must have felt his remorse in the way his arms tightened around her. Sighed again, squeezed his hands under her own. “It’s over now. You’re back. Some incredible magic brought you back to me… and I’m never letting you out of my sight again.”

“Christ, Buffy, I…”

“No.” Turning in his arms, she caught his mouth, threaded her hands in his hair. Of course he responded with a will, attempted by it to assure her of his fidelity, his determination to give her all and everything she might ever need. Everything of him and then some, and never again leave her wanting. When she lifted away, her eyes burned on his in the darkness of the hold, something haunted in them. “Just keep close and be here in the morning, so I know you’re not a dream, okay?”

He breathed with her, rocked his forehead against hers; shaking with her, with the emotion of it. “Always. Never leave you again. Always gonna be here.”

“Okay.” She wrapped her arms tight around him and exhaled, the wildness in her gaze settling to loving, the anxious hazel deepening to peridot in the low light. “And I’ll be here too.”

Because she knew he’d also dreamed of her, and woken without her.

He laid a kiss against her forehead, and buried his face gratefully beside her cheek, nose in the glory of her hair. “Thanks for sayin’ it, pet. And I believe you.”

“About damn time.”

***

 **B:**  
  
After the spectacle of the high, oddly-inhabited cliffs of Gibraltar—a passage which inspired Spike to declaim to them in some language which he later informed them was Ancient Greek, some passage from a story about a guy named Ulysses who had sailed a ship through there and had a personal post-up with a whirlpool and some kind of squid with nine heads or something—they hit the Atlantic. 

The open sea was kind of terrifying. No more friendly coastline sliding by. Just endless nothingness. Ocean everywhere, and the stark awareness that it was just you and your boat and if that failed you you were screwed. And the whole uppy-downy-thing was serious out there. The ocean didn’t kid around when it came to slinging boats all over the place. You were never not in motion. 

Buffy had always prided herself in having a strong stomach. Motion had never been an issue for her. Roller-coasters, fast cars, blood and guts, whatever; she could handle it. Always had. But this was a step beyond. Even she had serious issues with it when their ship did its ‘shoot to the top of a wave and then tip over and head straight down to oblivion’ thing. 

It always came out of it like nothing happened, of course, but it was never not terrifying; each and every time. 

It didn’t help when Spike cheerfully assured her and a copiously-puking giant Dawn that, “This is nothing. Eight foot swell, maybe. You should see it on a smaller craft, not on a soddin' barge like this; or when there’s a storm and the whole bloody thing turns to shite. Rocketing down twelve, thirty, fifty-foot waves, ten a second. Bloody thrilling.”

/Of _course_ you would think so, you madman./ “Holy crap.”

“Could happen, a’course. Middle of the sodding hurricane season, this.”

“That’s helpful. Thanks, Spike.” He needed to shut up—not that she was going to use those words, since they were dangerous, anymore—and he _really_ needed to stop looking so damned excited at the prospect.

He belatedly caught the drift of her tone, or maybe her ‘shushing’ vibe. “S’not as bad at sea as it is when they hit land,” he qualified a little shamefacedly.

“Also super uplifting to hear.” She wapped him on the chest and glanced awkwardly back toward Dawn.

“You’ve… Ohmygod… Done this before?” said giant sister demanded, looking totally green at the thought of facing hurricanes. They were down in their ‘cabin’ area in the hold, hiding from the visuals. Not that it kept them from _feeling_ it, but it was somehow better not seeing it. 

It was daylight up there anyway, and Buffy preferred to spend the roller-coaster wrapped up in nice vampire arms with her nose buried in the smell of spicy Spike and leather duster. It made things more tolerable. 

Especially since Dawn kind of still smelled like puke. Even though she had run out of things to yak up hours ago and thus no longer had to run upstairs to hurl over the railing, she had been doing it steadily for long enough that it had pretty much permeated her clothes and hair. 

Also, there was that one time she hadn’t made it upstairs. They’d cleaned up, of course, but still. Giant-girl equaled lots of puke. How Spike was standing the aftereffects was beyond her. Probably that was why he was keeping his nose more or less constantly snugged against the top of Buffy’s head. “Yeah. Done this, what? Six times now, counting this one, and the trip back and forth from Uganda.” A faint sound of surprise. “Never thought I’d do it again; least this end of the bloody Pond. Lot easier and faster to just hide in the cargo area of an airplane if you can get one lands in the dark.”

/Right. Low air pressure wouldn’t bother a vampire./ 

“Tell you what, though; it’s a damn sight faster now than it was the first time. Probably we’ll get to the Colonies in seven, eight days tops. Used to take sodding ages in my day; or even back when I first went, on the old steamers. Was a reason most folks ferried all the way up to Liverpool for the trip, braved the bloody bergs an’ all—till Titanic went tits-up, anyway—since it cuts days off the thing to go round the top. Four days up there instead of a week and change down this way.” He made a strange, sour face, and Buffy felt something slide through the link between them. Something old and painful. “Best time I had on the ocean, for a bit anyway, was under it. You want to miss the weather, you go along under the waves and ice and things in a submarine. No better way to travel, for my money, can you avoid smellin’ the dozen anxious men buried in a tin can, scared they won’t come out alive and badly needin’ a shower.”

Buffy leaned back to stare at him, more than a little surprised. “You’ve been in a submarine?”

Something shuddered through the claim. Something pained. “Let’s just say that bit with the Initiative wasn’t my first run-in with Nazis who wanted to experiment on the undead, and leave it at that, alright pet? Any road, submarines are too much of a bleedin’ gamble. Spend half the time wonderin’ are you gonna make it back up; and if you are, will you have to swim it for shore?”

She felt kind of like a parrot, but couldn’t help herself. “You had to swim for shore?”

“Drop it, Love.”

Something about the tangle of frustrated emotions flooding to her made that impossible. “No, I don’t think so. How far did you have to swim?”

He sighed heavily. “Buffy…”

But Dawn was paying some interest at this point too, the narrative having pulled her a little out of her constant misery. “You swam for shore from a sinking submarine? God, that’s amazing. And just when I thought you couldn’t get any cooler…”

Spike gave in. He always would, if it was something that would help Dawn. “Oh, bloody hell. It wasn’t ‘cool’, Niblet. I was pissed off and betrayed by the vamp who’d taught me everything I knew and abandoned me for the second time to fend for m’self with a bloke who’d been sired against his will. ‘Bout went sack of hammers over it before I made it to the coast. Had to go miles to get there. Barely made it before sunrise. Nearly did me in; just regrettin’ the whole soddin…”

 _“Angel_ was there?” Buffy demanded, catching up to the roaring feeling of betrayal surging between them. 

“It’s a long story, Buffy. One I don’t much feel like tellin’ right now.” God, he sounded tired all the sudden.

“Who… sired the other guy?”

Indigo eyes arrowed in to pin her hard and fast. “Not me,” he informed her flatly.

“Oh. Damn.” Angel had sired someone against his will… after he’d had a soul. It would have to have been after, since when he’d been cursed there hadn’t been things like submarines, and the soul-getting had been what had caused him to ‘abandon’ Spike and Dru in the first place, and… “So… what happened to…”

“Lawson? He had no idea how to go about the business, yeah? Got sired just to do a job and get the boat home, then orphaned right after. Spent sixty-odd years tryin’ to come to terms with bein’ a vamp, but he was too good a bloke. Was a soldier, yeah? Just wanted a job to do. An’ maybe bein’ sired by a vamp with a soul messed him up." Spike shrugged it off, or at least tried, though Buffy thought she saw some effort in it. "Probably got a wonky demon.” 

/Holy crap./ It was such a bleak summary. “How do you know all this? Did you… try to help him?”

Spike shook his head grimly. “Me? Hell no. I ran off as well. Had to look out for number one; and anyway, I’d been snapped up by those Nazi bastards and left Dru all alone. Had to go see if she was alright. Left the poor sod alone to figure out which way was up.” His mouth twisted. “Besides, he wasn’t my lookout, was he? Way I looked at it back then, I didn’t sire the tosser.”

“Oh.”

He glanced away from her as if he felt judged. Honestly, Buffy didn’t know how to feel. Just realizing that Angel could sire someone after he had his soul and then leave them out to dry like that had her in a whirl of stunned shock. She could see how a soulless, fancy-free Spike wouldn’t have wanted to deal with yet another of his grandsire’s thoughtless progeny. Drusilla had probably kept his hands plenty full, so she supposed she couldn’t blame him for running the other way. 

Angel, though, had no such excuse. Really, when you got right down to it, Drusilla was his responsibility as well, and he’d left Spike, her childe, to care for her instead of doing right by his mad scion… and then he’d gone and done it again when he was supposed to have known better?

/Just when I thought I’d heard it all. Man./

“What… happened to him?” Dawn asked, sounding almost as thrown as Buffy felt.

Spike sighed and tossed a food wrapper away from himself. “He ended up comin’ back to Peaches in LA last year, to demand the ponce do somethin’ to fix him. Tried to force him into it by attackin’ our friends, though honestly I don’t think he meant to hurt ‘em so much as to get the git’s attention. All he did was tie ‘em up.” Buffy wasn’t sure she’d ever seen her guy’s face look so strained, so sour; or at least, not for a long time. “Prick could’ve helped him still, I reckon. Taken responsibility; but if I’ll say anything for my grandsire, he’s bloody well consistent. He hates putting up with raising any of his get if he can avoid it. At least after the great and glorious Penn; so he decided to stake the poor blighter instead.”

Somehow Buffy hadn’t expected that, even though she probably would have done the same even a year or two ago. “He what?”

“Yeah.” The sour look turned to snark. “Lawson just stood there, lookin’ at him, beggin’ for help, askin’ for a purpose. He coulda taken him on, given the bloke a job at the firm or somesuch… and instead he staked the poor fool.” Looking down, Spike shrugged slightly. “No soul, and still all the man ever wanted was a mission; some way to do right.” Regret touched lightly on Spike to filter through to her. “Tough not to see myself in him, yeah? Made me wonder why Angel never just staked me… or when he would, an’ me hangin’ about the way I was." His eyes lit on her, awareness seeping through him to touch on the part of her, deep inside, that would understand. The part of her that had died, and come back, and been lost. "Maybe why I kept on, yeah?”

Buffy was currently experiencing about a round half-dozen of conflicting emotions, among them a furious, belated terror over the death-wish she had well known Spike had possessed back in Los Angeles, and the certain horror that there was so much she had never known about her ex, and which she sometimes wished she could un-learn, because, wow. Just, really; wow.

“When did… When was this Lawson guy from?” Dawn asked, sounding tentative but fascinated. She had clearly missed the undercurrents, not being in the know about events in LA. Her voice, if shaky from nausea, was that of someone clinging to any story that would draw her away from the present misery.

Spike grunted, rallying. “World War Two, Platelet. Nineteen-forty-three.”

“Wow. Remind me to keep you around next time I need help in history class.”

That earned her a dismissive noise. “What they call history in school now is a bare dip at the trot, Bit. Essays I used to have to write in primary were tougher than the things you lot have you do now in uni.”

Joining him in the wide u-turn toward normalcy, Buffy jabbed him in the belly with one finger. “Bet you walked uphill both ways too, grandpa.”

He caught the offending digit and glared blue death at her. “Oi! Just sayin’! I think school’s a load of rubbish designed to turn people into robots, but knowledge itself is brilliant, so if they’re gonna do it, they might as well do it right, and…”

“I love you.” 

He stilled instantly, the way he always did when she said it. “What the bloody hell was that for?” he demanded, still a little riled up.

“Being confusing and adorable.”

“Bite your tongue. I’m not sodding adorable, Buffy, dammit…”

“You know,” Dawn broke in, sounding strangely dreamy, “the weird thing is… Remember that spell Willow did back when Oz left? The one where Giles was blind, and Xander and Anya were being chased down by a zillion demons, and you two thought you were gonna get married…”

Completely thrown off track, Buffy swiveled around to stare at her sister. As often happened whenever Dawn referenced one of those moments she could never have actually experienced in real life, there was a brief second of strange dichotomy; the realization that none of this was real, that Dawn had probably never been there to witness any of it, that she had been… Where was she? Nowhere, and it had probably happened completely differently from how Buffy now remembered it, and how weird was that? 

But yet… she _did_ remember it now, was the thing. An impulsive, thirteen-year-old Dawn was in every frame of that recollection; pleading to come over to Giles’ apartment to see the vampire chained up in the bathtub, because remember how cool he had acted back during the Angelus thing, and he couldn’t be _that_ bad, right? Buffy telling her in no uncertain terms that no, she most certainly wasn’t going to come prod at the dangerous, bloodthirsty demon currently taking up residence in the bathroom, and Dawn was to stay at home and as far from Giles’ place as possible. Which of course meant that Dawn had done exactly the opposite of what her overwhelmed sister had asked, and snuck over to see Spike… just as the spell had taken effect. Watched them coo over one another, melted when Spike had ruffled her hair and hugged her and asked, “How’s my li’l sister-to-be?”… and thus had commenced the fracturing of Dawn’s then-monogamous crushing on Xander into a bifurcated thing where she had from then onward crushed equally and completely differently on both the capable and accessible sweet-guy… and the dangerous bad-boy, for, apparently, the remainder of recorded time. 

Spike was grinning now, his arms tightening around Buffy to snuggle her close. “Good spell, that. I especially liked the part where I got to snog big sis for hours on end without getting slugged on the beak for it…”

Buffy leaned back to eye him in confusion. “I though you were disgusted about it, afterward.”

The twinkle in his eye faded slightly. “Yeah, well… Officially, yeah, but unofficially… You were one hot piece, alright? Wasn’t gonna admit it out loud, but…”

She rolled her eyes at him. 

_“Anyway,”_ Dawn broke in, sounding aggrieved at their constant, edgy flirting, “the weird thing is, you guys totally act now like you did then. Kind of dorky and totally stuck together, and practically coming up with dumb excuses for things to fight about because it’s almost like you like fighting a little bit… but not a lot, or something. And did you know you’re completely gooshy? I mean, in a gross way, but gooshy.”

Buffy felt her eyes lock with Spike’s, and alright. She would let the part about ‘inventing reasons to fight’ pass right by, but, “Except now it’s real,” she answered quietly. The reply was more for Spike, in the moment, than for Dawn. 

Eyes riveted on hers, Spike slipped his hand up to fold his fingers in hers. 

The boat dipped alarmingly downward. Their pallets slid hard against their few fastenings. Dawn made a retching sound that had nothing to do with people being grossly adorable. It broke the moment, and Buffy lifted her head once more to eye her chartreuse sister. “We need to see if the captain has any Dramamine for you, Dawn. You need to keep some food down.”

Dawn made a miserable kind of sound and shivered. “Like there’s enough in the world for someone my size.”

The boat swung back the other way as they headed up the other side of whatever wave. Dawn’s color went south some more. End of distraction. “Well… we could look online for dosage by weight or whatever. They have a satellite uplink in the main cabin. Or just wing it and double the dose. You’re basically twice our size, so that should work, right?”

No answer beyond a faint moan.

It was going to be a long voyage if they didn’t get her taken care of, stat.

***

They made landfall in Norfolk, Virginia, after a seriously long week of trying to keep Dawn alive. Luckily they didn’t actually run across any tropical storms, mostly due to the captain’s skill at avoiding weather than anything, Buffy thought. There was one ‘squall’ that defeated all the Dramamine in the world and even had Buffy feeling ready to take drugs by the end, but at best it made the waves go to about twelve feet and didn’t wreck the boat, so she supposed they should take it and be happy. 

Spike, with his bellyfuls of blood, couldn’t vomit if he tried. He’d actually informed them at one point that vampires were physically incapable of puking and that that was how the Initiative had taken them down so easily, and that poisoning their blood could do untold damage, which, talk about dangerous inside knowledge. In any case, with his immunity to nausea, he was their rock through the whole storm; an observation which made him chuckle darkly and make snide comments Buffy didn’t understand at all when she mentioned it to him afterward. Something about that being ‘a sodding contradiction in terms’ and not belonging in ‘anybody’s bloody maritime hymnal’.

Sometimes being in love with someone who had grown up in another time period really did weird things with cultural references. Or maybe that was an England thing? 

No way to know, really.

Anyway, they were finally back in the US; which felt bizarre, for the record, after living in Europe for a year-plus. Not that Buffy had ever been to the East Coast, and they had a serious road trip ahead of them, but still. Mixed feelings, most of them good, even if the visit was (maybe) temporary. “We’ll offload your stuff so you can get it set as soon as nightfall rolls around,” their Lister friend told them blandly as they stood just below the level of the deck, Buffy and Dawn looking out toward the teeming, sun-bathed, industrial-looking docks. “Don’t know where you’re headed, but I hope you have a ride set up or something…”

Buffy lifted one shoulder. “We should have something by then.” /If Giles is as good as his word, anyway./ Her call to her ex-Watcher, made as soon as they were within sight of land and she’d gotten her signal back, had been mostly-business, but it had gotten the job done. He’d promised a useful conveyance similar to the one they’d used back in Europe, to be driven down by one of Vi’s girls. They could expect said personage in Norfolk to meet them by evening. Manhattan was only about six or seven hours from them, so most of the time would be taken up with finding an appropriate, Dawn-friendly vehicle for the job. “I was serious about back-pay, too. We know you had to sacrifice a lot of cargo-space, and we really appreciate… everything.” /You know, like you not throwing us overboard, since we made you way uneasy./ The guy and his crew had ended up relaxing around them by about Gibraltar, but still. Paying him might seriously help end things on a good note. Keep it out of the realm of favors.

“No dice,” the Lister insisted, holding up both hands. “I meant what I said.” He started backing away. “Safe travels to wherever you’re going…”

 _“Long_ travels,” Dawn complained, half-cheerfully. “I’m gonna be on another bus or something for days, till we get to Berkeley…”

The Lister frowned. “You’re going all the way to San Francisco?”

“Yeah. I’m enrolled there. Maybe if I can get de-cursed I can go back. Just gotta fit through the doors first…” She shot Buffy and Spike a few pointed glares. “Since some people think it’s a sin for me to defer my admission and take a year off.”

“Dawn, we’ve been through this. You lose your momentum and you’ll end up like me. I promise you, you won’t like that…”

Their captain held up one hand. “That how you ended up like this? You got cursed?”

Spike growled. “It’s a long bloody story. Let’s just say our Bit’s gonna watch which demons she dates from here on out, innit Platelet?”

Dawn’s reply was a tired litany. “Only the ones who won’t curse me and yadda yadda yadda; yes, Spike, I know. And no one who’s gonna involve me in any esoteric blood ceremonies, yes, Buffy, I know. I wasn’t born yesterday…”

“You were born four years ago. Forgive us for still being a little protective.”

“Seriously? When are you gonna stop throwing that in my face?”

The captain looked really confused by now. “Um, can I ask you something?”

His quiet reentry into the conversation tore everyone’s attention from the quiet family bickering. “Okay?” Dawn answered, being the one most directly addressed.

“You meet a part-Lister there named Zach? Might not have looked much like me. He passes really well, since he’s mostly human. Last name’s Dilfert; goes by Dilly sometimes…” At their confused looks he shrugged slightly. “I just thought, since you sound like you spent a lot of time with the mixed-species underground…”

Dawn lifted a single, large shoulder. “I might have. I mean, there were a lot, you know? Couple part-Brachen kids. Kenny—my ex-boyfriend, he’s a thricewise—some Thurgald girls. Oh, and that one half Ano-Movic guy, Tim. He was cute. Might have been a part-Lister at one of the parties. Not sure. I wasn’t there very long…”

The captain frowned and shook his head, passing it off. “No problem. I just thought…” His thin lips twisted a little. “Not many of us left. Most who wanted to survive at all assimilated; like the Brachens. Most of us are hiding out on farms in Nebraska and Kansas, but Zach really wanted to go to school on the coast…” His pale, haunted eyes flickered up to meet Buffy’s. “And I thought since you seem to be… so easygoing about part-demons, and you stopped the Scourge…” 

Buffy was starting to get it. “It wouldn’t hurt for a Slayer’s kid sister to befriend one of the few remaining Listers, and you’d take just that as payment for the trip?”

The grayish-brown skin paled a little to a sort of teal-woodsmoke color. “Zach’s a good kid. Bright, curious, studious… My favorite cousin. Deserves a better world. I dunno why you decided some demons are alright, but if he ends up friends with your kid sister, then maybe he’ll end up on the ‘nice’ list instead of the 'naughty' one, and you can step up for him if any of your friends decides he needs to go on the block. You know, we just have too many enemies as it is, and it’s hard enough staying alive these days.”  
  
Buffy felt her lips tighten. “For one thing, the Slayer Organization is something I started. I’m the senior member. I learned the hard way that nothing’s as simple as the Watchers taught me, and I’ve done my best to pass that on to the Slayers I trained. If no one’s bothering anyone, they get left alone, or I’ll hear about it, and I’ll have words with the Slayers who are causing trouble...”

Their captain leaned back on his heels, looking startled. 

“I may be retired, but slaying should be about stopping baby-killings and apocalypses, or if there’s a serious demon-human relations incident; not interfering when someone’s just minding their own business. And even then… I’ve learned that there’s a lot going on under the surface that we just don’t understand sometimes. I’m willing to learn about that. I’ve learned to listen first before I start whacking off heads, and I’m gonna be the first one to stand in front of my sisters if they’re going from zero to slay without asking questions first.”

The pale eyes jerked from her to Spike and back, looking awed. “I… That’s… different.”

“She’s a bit different, mate. Seen some things.”

“I… guess.”

Buffy tilted her head at the captain. “What’s your name? So that when Dawn runs into this Zach kid at Berkeley she can pass on your best wishes.”

The captain gaped a little, then his gaze wandered to Dawn. “Troy,” he whispered, sounding floored. “Troy Dilfert.”

Buffy held out a hand. “Buffy Summers, formerly of the Sunnydale hellmouth. This is Spike, ex-demon-lord of Beverly Hills, among other things…”

Spike smirked and tilted his head genially in greeting. 

“You’ve met Dawn, previously the nemesis of a hellgod.”

A shaky gray-brown hand met hers. Folded around. Firmed. The greeting was about more than an exchange of names. It felt like a beginning. “We’ll keep an eye on Zach for you,” she told him quietly, because she knew what it was like to only have a few people left in all the world.

Captain Troy nodded and stepped back, looking exceedingly relieved. “Anywhere you want to go. Ever. Paid in full.” He cleared his throat and jerked his gaunt head away toward the deck. “Gotta see to it the rest of the cargo is offloaded. Be back later to check in on you.” Turning, he stalked swiftly away… but his shoulders seemed less slumped, his frame carrying significantly less weight than they had moments prior.

/You know, all this networking with a whole other, formerly-despised part of the world? Has its perks. Why the hell did I completely blow it off before?/

Spike’s eyes were telling as he slipped an arm over her shoulder.

And suddenly that whole idea of liaising between the Slayers and the demons of the world didn’t seem like such a tall order, after all.

***  
  
  
  
  
  
  
I just realized that this "section" of the fic is longer, maybe, than the rest.   
Hm.  
  
Alright; the "road" part of the road-trip is on again in the next installment!


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Moar road-trippy goodness. Some smut, some exploration, some more smut, some feral...ness, some family-building. General chill-time. Because man, this story is pretty low on the drama-meter, if you disregard a few moments with the Scourge and Giles.
> 
> Huh. Maybe I just got most of the drama out of my system in Hell-A, lol.  
> Thank you, every one, for being here!

“Oh, good. I’m glad. So Camilla got it back up to Scotland in one piece?”

‘Yeah. The rugby team says the bent seat-strut’s no problem. Something about how they’re hard on the bus anyway…’

Buffy relaxed a little at Andrew’s summary, phone held out so that Spike and Dawn could also hear. Not that they necessarily cared, but whatever. 

‘How did it get bent like that, anyway?’

Hunched over the comfortable driver’s seat, Spike tensed at the tinny voice ringing over speakerphone. At which point Buffy promptly decided to step right over that one. “Long story, Andrew. I have a question for you, though. When, um, we got to the apartment, Spike was able to walk right in. Obviously you never disinvited him…”

‘Oh. Uh, no. I didn’t think there was a reason. They were heading back to LA…’ There was a short silence, and she could tell just from his tones that the cringing little guy was holding something back. 

Buffy went in for the kill. “Did you take back Angel’s invite?”

A short pause. ‘Uh, well, yeah. But we didn’t know what he was up to right then, so I figured better to uninvite him. You know, just in case…’

“But you left the door open for Spike; even though he was working with Angel.’ The illogic of that was clear to anyone who paid the slightest bit of attention.

Another short silence, and then Andrew was bursting at the seams. ‘Okay, so I didn’t want to take it back for Spike, okay? I love that guy. I think he’s great, and I wanted him to leave Angel and come back to me… us. So I figured if I left it open, maybe he’d break away sometime and come back. I mean, he adores you, and he wasn’t stuck on the LA thing the way Angel was, so maybe…’

Sitting at the front of their new conveyance, a stripped-down motorhome, Spike smirked at nothing in particular. Buffy felt herself grinning as well. Andrew liked to pretend he was James Bond or something, but there were moments when it all fell apart on him and it was clear that he was at least super bi, if not totally gay. But she had learned long ago, specifically from Willow, that you just didn’t pry about that subject. 

Actually, it had been Willow who had warned all of them not to push when it came to Andrew. _“If he’s not ready yet, he’s not ready,”_ she’d told all of them back last year when they’d all started to really exchange glances about his totally-clear gayness. _“You can’t shove someone out of the closet. They have to open the door themselves. Believe me, I know. And besides… with guys, there’s a whole lot more to lose.”_ She’d shrugged a little, expression troubled. _“Not that Andrew’s ever been alpha-male status, but still. He’ll drop right off the top of the patriarchy if he gives up his spot. Leave him alone with his fantasy. He’s still stuck in ‘I wanna_ be _that guy’, not ‘I wanna be_ with _that guy’. It’s a process.”_

‘Besides; I knew… you wouldn’t want me to,’ Andrew rambled on over the phone, all dithering and anxious. ‘He always had an open door from you, and I thought… we didn’t really know what he was up to, helping Angel, but maybe he was even _spying_ on Angel for you. Like… being some kind of double-agent for us, and someday he’d come back and let us know what was the what, and he couldn’t if the door was closed, so…”

Okay, this was quickly turning into one of those Andrew-centric rabbit-holes, where soon there would be side-plots and original characters and a neat caper involving a stolen artifact, and she needed to head him off, stat. “Andrew, which was your favorite James Bond, again?”

‘Timothy Dalton,’ came the prompt answer.

“Oh, bloody hell,” Spike retorted from the front seat. 

‘What? He brought the franchise back from all the way-too-gimmicky stuff they were doing with Roger Moore and made it cool again. And besides, he wore a tuxedo like nobody’s business, and they had to reboot things out of the Cold War somehow. He had big shoes to fill…’

Spike grunted. “You have a point. Moore was rubbish. Still; no one beats Connery.”

Okay, wow. She hadn’t expected her guy to, whatever. Mind-meld with Andrew about the subject. (Was that the term? Mind-meld? She thought she’d heard Xander use it before.) Anyway, time to interrupt again, before things got out of hand. She’d redirected Andrew sufficiently. “Did you de-Buffify Mia?”

Rome’s Watcher was clearly thrown by her swift change of subject, now he was on a fandom roll. ‘What? Oh, yeah. She’s back to living her life. She says she’s glad.’

“Great. Thank her again for me. Talk to you later, Andrew.”

He sounded startled as ever by the abrupt end to the conversation. ‘Okay, uh, take care you guys! By Spike, bye Dawn!’

Half-asleep in the rear portion of the RV, Dawn mumbled something appropriately goodbye-ish.

Buffy closed the phone and shot her love a tolerant look. “If you don’t want the guy to crush on you, you shouldn’t encourage him.”

Spike tore his eyes from the endless, darkened blacktop to shoot her a brief, startled look. “What the bloody hell are you on about?”

“Sharing someone’s enthusiasms can count as flirting, you know. Especially with a nerd like him. You spend enough time bantering about the relative pros and cons of different James Bonds, and he’s gonna end up thinking it counts as pillow-talk or something.”

That earned her a narrow-eyed glare. “Buffy, the little poof’s not even out of the bloody closet.”

“And you’re super easy to crush on.” She leaned forward to press herself lightly to the available sliver of his back, aware of exactly what she was doing as her right nipple compressed against his shoulder blade. “Tell me, Spike,” she interrogated his right ear, “have you had any other long, soulful conversations with Andrew?” Lowered her voice a just a little, though she kept it amused. “Should I be worried?”

His tones turned suspicious. “Oh, for Chrissake, Buffy… For all I could show him the time of his life, we both know it’s not gonna happen, so what are you playing at?”

She grinned teasingly against his neck. “You led him on somehow. I’m curious.”

That comment seemed to choke Spike into silence. When he spoke again, it was in a strangely taut tone. “When we were off on the motorbike lookin’ for clues about the bleedin’ Scythe, we had a moment talkin’ about the bloody onion blossom and what a work of art it is. ‘Sall. An’ don’t call it leadin’ the little sod on. I’m a bit of an epicurean, yeah? Doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Well, I think it was a special moment in his life.”

“Oh, bloody hell. Reason number seventeen we’re not goin’ back to Italy.”

Sliding her palms down over his pecs, she leaned her chin down on the join of his shoulder and neck so that her cheek was pressed against the now-healed spot that had once held her bite. She needed to renew it. It irritated her that she couldn’t really leave a mark on him. Not that he had ever left all that much of a mark on her, but that was by intention. His was a matter of healing. Hell; her human _ex_ - _boyfriend_ had left more of mark on him than she had, which was just unacceptable. 

Maybe if she just bit hard enough, at some point she could leave at least a hint of a scar, if only the faintest dimple. As of right now all she could find—and that on super-close inspection under serious lamplight—was, _maybe_ , the bare hint of a whisper of a mark in one spot that could just as easily have been a blemish from his former life. 

Didn’t mean he didn’t shiver when she touched him there, same as when he did it to her. The nerves knew, even if the skin had forgotten. 

She drew her hands back up over his chest, brushed his nipples. It had been a long voyage. A few grope-sessions behind the cargo, a blow-job here, a little lick-and tickle there… It got the job done, but it wasn’t really with the completely satisfying, especially when you could feel everything the other person was feeling at any given moment.

This double-bond thing was like being claimed the first time around, only plus infinity. /God, I’m horny./ “It’s okay, Spike,” she whispered into his nape. “If you need to have a quick affair with Andrew, I’m alright with it.”

As her breath ruffled the short curls at the base of his neck, his skin shuddered under her touch. The baffled irritation her words engendered fled like zephyrs as sensation swamped their link. “You keep doin’ that, and I’m gonna pull this rig over and find us a nice tree…”

“Terrible idea. We’d lose so much time…” She just barely restrained herself from nipping him. Her teeth might have grazed his skin slightly, though.

He jerked, hard. “…And prove to you exactly how ridiculous you sound right now, you insane bint…” he managed, though he sounded hoarse.

She smirked, let him feel it, right there beneath his ear. “I’m just saying that I totally trust you to come back to me after your fling on the wild side, since it would completely be a public service.” She did a little more protracted nuzzling at her not-mark. “It would get him off your case. You could…" Nuzzle. "...Totally blow his mind and…" Nuzzle. "...Be back in time for breakfast, and then…" Nudge. "...We wouldn’t have to avoid Italy anymore…”

One hand left the steering wheel to catch hers before she could make another circuit of his chest. He glanced back at a sleeping Dawn. “Buffy…” His voice was strained now.

Lowering her mouth, she nipped at his neck.

He yanked the steering wheel hard over to the side of the road and put the RV in park. Had her hand and was dragging them out of the door before she could even register what was happening, the sultry August air of one AM in middle-of-nowhere West Virginia whirling by her face…

And then she was against a rough-barked tree, piney smells around her, laughing at the realization that she was probably going to have some kind of sap on her clothes by the end of this.

Spike had had just barely enough presence of mind to get them around to the side of the tree that was opposite the RV, so if Dawn woke up she wouldn’t see them. Buffy honestly didn’t care at this point. It was dark as the inside of one of his boots out here. She tore at his belt while he scrabbled at her jeans, and, “Don’t tear the button. I still want to wear these.”

“Then get the sodding things off!”

Not-giggling, his urgency and her own mingling inside her to ratchet her up to a fever pitch, she helped as much as she could, to the point of abandoning her quest to get his pants taken care of. They managed to get one of her legs out without even tearing her underwear—teamwork!—and he was fumbling one-handed with his own jeans. “Why the bloody hell you stopped wearing skirts…” His fingers were already busy against and inside of her, oh god…

“They’re super-inconvenient for slaying. Come _here.”_ She had briefly forgotten the ‘don’t give direct commands’ part of festivities, but Spike seemed to be happy enough to comply.

_“Bloody_ convenient for shagging,” he informed her, and she heard a familiar crunching noise, the sound of bones thickening, caught an amber glow in the dark, like cat’s eyes. 

/Oh, _God_ yes./ 

He came into her hard, and she hitched a leg over his hip and threw her head back to thrust against his fingers, already mindless. “Nnnn…” God, there were a lot of gorgeous stars out here, blinking through the tops of the trees…

A hard thrust of cock and hand and she forgot about stargazing, her head _thunking_ back against bark and bole hard enough that she saw a few stars of her own making. Pushed back, driving herself crazy on his fingers. _“God…”_

“That’s right, Love, take your pleasure on me, Christ, I love watching that…”

“So… nnn… not fair that you… can see me right now… Oh! And I can’t…”

His voice was a low, hoarse rumble in her ear, against her neck, running through her bones and making her shiver. “You know exactly what I look like. What you do to me.”

/Show you… what I do to you…/ Shaking with the tremors galloping down her spine, she lowered her face to his neck. And bit him. 

“Fuck, oh fucking Christ…” Sensations sprinted through him, and from him to her, on an electric current that set her own spine alight. His hips promptly snapped from slow, controlled thrusts to a wild, maddened tattoo that pounded her against the tree, and oh god _yes_. 

Shoving her hands under the duster, she dug her nails hard into his shoulder blades and hung on for the ride, giving back as good as she got, and muffled her cries in his flesh while he lost himself in the feel of her reclaiming him. Lost herself while they broke the rough bark into dust; and she felt nothing but him thundering inside her, striking where the empty aching of her was finally sated; and his desperate climb to completion, the enormity of what he felt when he was inside her. The sensations stacked, built on each other, mirrored and mirrored again as he felt her and she felt him; and he was making sounds like muffled roaring into her shoulder… and she couldn’t hold out anymore. Everything inside her began to rush outward, shimmering, till she started to quake. She locked her teeth hard against his throat just at the same time as her body clenched around him to keep him forever, because he was a part of her. And every part of him spasmed in response, pleasure-pain rocketing through them both from him to her and back again.

“Oh bleeding sodding God, Buffy, I’m yours, oh fuck…”

Distantly, she heard something crack over her head, felt the thud of his fist driving hard into the poor tree as his hips snapped still and he juddered to a halt to abandon himself to her in turn. Her moment of triumph, always, and she swallowed the slight hints of his blood and dragged him to her by the hips; trembled with the aftershocks and the feel of his release as it flowed through them both while she dreamily considered all the ways she would make this even better when they had the time. Because right now she couldn’t afford the high that would come with another really full-scale attempt at marking him, but… This was a nice practice-session for things to come.

Still…

Pulling her head away, she leaned it back against the tree till he lifted his to stare into her eyes. A blur of white hair and burning eyes, he looked incredibly intense, blazing at her; and yet so insanely vulnerable. Before him, she would never have thought a demon-face could look that way. “When’s my turn?” she asked him softly.

With a low moan he slipped his hand down, stroking her still-sensitive clit; extremely lightly and with supreme care. “Whatever you want, whenever you want, Buffy.”

Dragging in a sharp breath, she closed her eyes and twitched on his hand, focused on the feel of him, still inside her. On the slow perking-to-awareness of parts of her that weren’t entirely sure they were ready for another round. He had never failed to be convincing, and her body knew it. And now, now that he could feel what she felt, he would be able to do this exactly how she needed it without a single word, which was…

Oh _god_ , it was good. He was… He’d already been the most amazing lover, but like _this_ … 

“Like that, Christ yeah, Buffy, lose yourself, just like that…”

She was going to dissolve, the pricking uncertainty of the flesh acquiescing, giving away abruptly to complete acceptance under his coaxing, and she was already clenching on him in slow, unstructured waves of half-aftershock and half-rebuilding urgency. His fingers had altered, with her body’s capitulation, from persuasion to demand, and he was saying things, poetic things; the kind of seductive, beautiful things he only let her hear him say when they were here… And god, someday she was going to get him to let her see some of his poetry. The written-down stuff had probably all been lost in the hellmouth, but she knew for a fact that he had it all memorized. This was a guy who could recite line-by-line, verse-by-verse, stuff he’d learned in school when he’d been alive a hundred-and-twenty-odd years ago. 

He’d for sure remember things he himself had written. “You’re like the finest crown jewels in the night, Buffy; the most perfect, but in the simplest setting. No need for anything gaudy because the night itself makes you shine. And in the day… Christ yeah, make that sound! Next to you immortality’s no prize, ‘cause there’s only you…”

Her breath caught, but she couldn’t think, and whatever had bothered her in his words was swept away by the tide of his movements. 

“That’s right, Love, just like that. The Queen of everything, sovereign of my universe, liege of my being; you hold dominion only by shining like that; come for me, just like that, Christ yeah…”

She was going to, and he knew it, was there against her neck and waiting as she dragged against his hips with her heels and desperate fingers, fighting for him to give her a little more. He rocked into her once, hard as she shuddered, losing her boundaries. Drummed his fingers against her, making her convulse… and drove his fangs home while she spiraled into her second orgasm of the night. And swung wildly on the opening gate of his wonder as he took her blood and jerked hard to come into her, the fierce, insane energy she gave him roaring through them both like wildfire. “Oh… God…”

He didn’t take much, closed her after only a mouthful. And shuddered against her with little, trembling jerks that were not-quite thrusts, breathing hard, while the maddening surges cascaded through his system. 

She bore down tight on him, her own pulsing aftermath almost superseded by the heady rushing of his high. “Are you gonna float away from me?” Thank god she hadn’t taken him in as well, or they’d never get out of here.

“I’ll manage, after a minute,” he breathed. “Have some practice, yeah?”

She couldn’t see how he’d ever learned to contain this. Apparently she would learn to get used to it too, when she had his blood? At least, if his reactions were any indication. Honestly, though, the fact that he wasn’t pulling away from her to howl, run in circles, and randomly murder things just for the hell of it was kind of majorly impressive. He _felt_ like an animated freight train. No way he was just going to be able to calmly sit down and drive a motorhome for hours after this, right?

Well. She could help with that. After all, she’d had a smidge of his blood to give her an edge, and she could feel his rush as if it were her own. 

Dropping her legs, she pushed him off of her and tugged up her underwear and pants while he was still stumbling back and gaping at the sudden uncoupling. “Wh…”

“You should probably put that away.”

“Buffy, what…”

She was way ahead of him, had her wardrobe back in one piece and more or less resolved while he was still gawking at her. It was a very damp wardrobe, but functional. “Last warning.” He was in kind of a compromised situation right now.

“You hear somethin’ comin’, or…”

Grinning, she punched him right in the jaw. A good, stiff uppercut, but not one designed to take him out. It was a stinging, sparring hit. A teasing invitation. 

His head rocked back, and came back up staring, amber eyes wide and amazed. And then they narrowed. “Oh, like that, is it?” 

“I gave you time to put yourself back together.” She eyed his… _area_ significantly. “I don’t think you wanna do this with all these tender things just flopping around.”

He threw her a growly sort of look and tucked himself swiftly back into his jeans. Snicked his belt together with a swift economy of movement. “Bein’ helpful, is it, Slayer?” But his body had already tightened up from ‘loose, just been fucked’ to ‘swaggering and ready to spar’. 

God, he was hot. How the hell she had gone as long as she had without screwing his brains out was still really way beyond her comprehension. “I just realized how really long it’s been since we had a nice rough and tumble…”

“I’ll give you rough and tumble, you mad chit,” he informed her, and dove in for the dumbest midsection judo-move she’d ever seen him do. Which, to be fair, probably had a lot to do with the fact that most of his borrowed blood was still hovering somewhere a little south of his brain. 

She had him on the ground in an instant and was standing over him, grinning and smelling, she knew, exactly like all the things they’d already done and could do again. “You wanna give that another shot? You know, without the stupid?”

He stayed on his back for a moment, shook his head like he was trying to get water out of his ears. “You’re like to drive me barmy, you know that?” And kicking up, he flipped her off of him onto her back, then did one of those sexy-as-fuck athletic things where he bounced back to his feet without touching the ground at all with his hands. “Alright, Love, let’s do this.”

She was up again as well, having performed her own version of the same move. “Love to.”

They rushed at each other in tandem, eyes equally alight in the dark and feral energy swirling between them on the blood.

Twenty minutes later, panting and grinning and post- a very necessary pants-change on Buffy’s part, they were off again, and Spike was much more on an even keel. And, well… He wasn’t the only one.

That had been a super long voyage. This whole cross-country thing, on top of that? It would have just been insult to injury in her book. /I may be retired, but I still have needs. If I’m not gonna be killing demons every day, I better be fucking and-or fighting one fairly regularly, or I’m gonna be one very unhappy Slayer, dammit./ 

There was more than one reason she liked to date vampires, okay?

***

“You have a really good voice, you know that?”

Spike jerked a little in mild shock. Scowled. Snapped his mouth shut mid-singalong and shot Dawn a baleful glare. The remainder of the Clash song—at least, Buffy _thought_ it was a Clash song—wound up to its finish without accompaniment.

She of course would have to agree, but it was amusing to see him caught out like this. So, feeling a little bit of an instigator, she leaned forward against her seat and cradled her chin in her hand. “He does, doesn’t he?”

Spike’s response was immediate and even a little bit betrayed. _“Buffy…”_

“How come I’ve never heard it?” Dawn demanded, clearly missing the undercurrents out of fascination. She shifted ponderously on her pallet to recline on one elbow in lieu of sitting up. “And how did Buffy get to hear it, if you’re so weirded out about singing in front of…” Then a broad, excited grin parted her lips in slow realization. “Oh, _wait,”_ she breathed, and now she was positively gloating. “Did you sing her something during the whole Sweet thing?” When Spike’s expression became pained hers turned exalted. “You _did!_ Oh my God, this is _great;_ Buffy what did he _sing_ you?”

Buffy didn’t need the death-glare from the highly uncomfortable vampire in the driver’s seat to know better. “I could tell you, Dawn, but then I’d have to kill you.”

“Oh, man…” Dawn whined a little, flapping her hand in her lap in disappointment, then brightened. “Wait, that’s confirmation, though. He totally did.” She was all grins and sparkling eyes once more as she watched them. “I bet it was something way smooshy. Just tell me; was it a ballad?”

That got Spike when nothing else would. “It was _not_ a sodding _ballad!”_

“Ooooh, okay, was it like, I dunno, one of those hopeless Punk love songs where the guy says like three lines and manages to sound all useless and pathetic and angry on repeat…”

“No,” Buffy interrupted softly, before Spike could explode or something. “It was definitely more than three lines. It was very eloquent.”

Spike relaxed slightly, hands loosening their vicious death-grip on the giant steering-wheel. 

“Oooh, alright, so was it, I dunno, Rockabilly, or…”

She wasn’t going to let it go. “It was a great song. And it was _private,_ Dawn.”

“Aw, man…”

“Dog with a bloody bone,” Spike breathed, but he sounded relieved as hell that Buffy had curtailed the twenty questions.

/I got your back, William./ “She just likes seeing the softer side of Spike.”

He grunted. And avoided singing along for at least another day and a half before he began to slip again. 

When he started, unconsciously, and Dawn got that glitter in her eye that said she was about to comment, it was Buffy’s turn to level her with a death-glare. To lean in close to her big-little sister and whisper, praying that the music was turned up high enough that Spike wouldn’t catch it with his overly-acute vamp-hearing. “If you make him self-conscious again, Dawn, I will _end_ you. I happen to like listening to him.”

The gleam faded from Dawn’s largish eyes, and she sighed and picked at her blanket, boredom settling back into her features. “Okay, but are you ever gonna tell me…”

“No. Or he might not ever sing me to sleep again, which is a thing I kind of treasure with all my soul.”

That earned her a shocked stare, which slowly devolved into an awed, delighted sort of smile. “Wow, he sings you to sleep?”

“Sometimes. If I’m having a really bad night.”

“Okay, that is pretty much the sweetest thing I have ever heard in my entire life.” Dawn tilted back to eye Buffy with an even, frank appraisal totally at odds with her papered age, much less her actual chronological one. “You’re aware that you two are, like, disgustingly, adorably perfect, right?”

Buffy smiled over at her oblivious guy. “Yeah. Who knew, right?”

***

It took them a little over three days to get to Berkeley, since they had to stop at about three in the afternoon every day until around eight-thirty at night when the sun went down to keep Spike from getting fried in the driver’s seat. There was also the stopping to walk around-slash-sightsee, get food, and generally get the hell out of the motorhome whenever possible that kind of stretched things out a bit.

The Appalachians were gorgeous; long, flowing, rolling hills covered in trees, dotted with tiny towns here and there, a lot of which seemed to have gone back in time a little and some of which looked like they had seen better days; but there were also some pretty huge cities on their route, like Louisville. That was for sure one of the shinier cities Buffy had ever seen in her life; built right on the water and doing its best to blind everyone with the whole ‘glowing and reflecting skyscrapers’ thing. 

After a year spent in Europe, with that weird mix of super-new and incredibly old, with neo-glass and medieval stonework all next to one another, the single-note look of American cities actually… kind of threw her. It was all so… modern. Virginia had been more like the port-towns in the UK in some ways, with that mix of old and new, but the further west they went, the more it was just… new. Industrial and shining and… “It really makes you realize how young your own country is, coming back.”

Spike smirked and leaned back. “Americans are excellent at revision. Anything doesn’t work, you just knock it down, build something new, forget the old thing was ever there. I told you how much New York has changed in just the last twenty-odd years and you wouldn’t believe me. Back on the other side, people leave things stand long as possible as a kind of testament to history… whether they should or not. You lot are too bloody impatient for that.” He waved a hand at the broad landscape into which they had descended. “All the sodding real-estate in the world, and you stick to one spot and just keep building right over the top of things.”

Dawn made a face from the rear of the RV. “Better than killing more trees,” she pointed out.

Spike grunted. “Have a point, I guess. Europe collectively murdered the whole bleedin’ Black Forest for firewood before we got ‘round to realizing we needed it. Nowhere for the werewolves to hide anymore, innit? And they wonder why all the sudden the poor blighters were out snackin’ on the populace…”

“And then they went pretty much extinct?” Dawn asked, sounding interested. “Just a few here and there, like Oz? Because their habitat got cut down and they started invading, like when we moved up into the Sierra Nevadas and then people started getting mad about mountain lions on their front porches?”

Buffy had never thought about it that way. /Damn./

“Doesn’t much matter who fires the first shots in a battle,” Spike answered, and pulled the RV over into a rest stop. “What usually matters is who fires the last one. Or who has more soldiers.” Standing up, he headed for the door. “Need a smoke break.”

Living twenty-four-seven with a Master vampire tended to upset your worldview on a regular basis, between the historical perspectives and the just, general ‘getting the demon point-of-view’ thing. 

And people wondered why Buffy was too conflicted anymore to just go out and get into daily anti-demon fights. Which kind of sucked, since it seemed like even retired, they still had a tendency to come to her. 

Spike wanted to stop at one of the more famous distilleries outside Louisville while they were in Kentucky, being as it was the birthplace of bourbon or whatever. When she asked why they needed to hang around a distillery when he could just buy the stuff at any corner market he’d given her a dumbfounded look, as if her semi-suspicious expression was the worst of unfounded accusations. “They give out free samples, pet.” And then he’d grinned irrepressibly at her. “Can stop at one of the vineyards too, while we’re about. Know there are a couple. Have a nice wine-tasting…”

Damn him. If he was trying to get her drunk again so that he could have designs on her person, he really needed to wait till they were somewhere that wasn’t very cozy and currently housing her younger—if not smaller—sister. Dawn had already proved impressionable enough without drunken kink and vampire-Slayer acrobatics in the near vicinity. 

Of course, while they were hanging around said distillery, Spike ran across demon-trouble, because why not? Why couldn’t they just, you know, have a simple, cross-country trip through untroubled Americana without having to face down questions about personal ethics and create a new chapter in the ‘Buffy is wracked with a showdown in her troubled inter-species morality’ saga? 

She felt it first, of course. His alarm, the faint prickings of unease. “Dawn, stay here.”

“What? What is it?”

“Nothing, I hope.” She was already out of the RV and racing across the twilit parking lot toward the main building of the distillery; a many-peaked, barn-colored building with a black roof. Spike was somewhere behind it—she could feel him—and whatever situation he was in was getting more dire by the moment.

She boiled around the corner, hand clutching at the stake tucked into her belt under the hem of her thin leather jacket. Vaulted a low fence, and skidded to a halt in front of a wide, cargo door filled with barrels, to find her guy standing in front of said door, hands spread. He had a square bottle with a tan label clutched in his left, fingers spread so the bottle was held loosely between just thumb and forefinger; and, tellingly, it was being brandished ass-up. This was not a drinkable. It was a wearable. 

Spike didn’t abuse a nice whiskey lightly. This was so not a friendly affair. 

To add weight to the festivities, his right hand was turned backward in a pointed gesture to three human guys standing behind him. “As I was sayin’, boys,” he rumbled as she approached, “I don’t think this is your kind of party.” His voice was easy, but she could hear the undercurrent in it; one meant as much for her as for them. He was pretty sure the situation he was in was hanging by a thread, and that violence was very shortly to ensue. 

She really thought he was right, considering that the demons he was facing were pretty familiar sorts. For one thing, there were five of them. For another thing, they were the same biker-types as the ones who had torn up Sunnydale the night she’d been brought back from the dead. And while the new Buffy kind of hoped that mediation might be the order of the day more often than not, she kind of had the sinking feeling that maybe… not so much with these guys. At least, judging from past experience. 

Though, this wasn’t Sunnydale, and they didn’t necessarily know her here, so maybe she could get off on the right foot with them? /Still. God, how many _are_ there of this gang? I thought we got ‘em all!/ “Trouble, honey?” she called sweetly from behind the broad, leather-clad backs. 

Spike, of course, had felt her coming, though no doubt he hadn’t exactly expected that greeting. Still, he took it in stride. “Oh, you know. Attempted robbery, a little mayhem. It’s Sunday, but you gotta figure, for our lot that’s like Saturday night in Tijuana.”

The biker-demons had all turned a little at her approach… and, of course, immediately began grinning. For one, she was wearing a wide-collared shirt and her hair was up right now, which meant that between her build and dress and the very visible marks on her neck, they had probably already written her off as some kind of long-term vamp-kibble. She would disabuse them of that notion right now, and drew a little closer; wary but without overt advertisement of violence. “Don’t suppose we could come to some sort of arrangement. You know, one that ends with the fun going somewhere else?”

“Aw, son; look at the snack, thinkin’ she can play with the big boys. Bloodsucker doesn’t have her trained at all!” The apparent leader of the pack—winner for most-tattoo’d and with-most-metal-implants—turned back to Spike, smirking. Or at least Buffy thought he was smirking, though it was hard to tell under all that twisted flesh and weird metal attachments. These guys were almost as pretty as the Scourge were. “You’re about to lose your bloodbag in the worst way, toothless.” And, of course, because he was grody, he cupped himself and hitched up to make it exceedingly clear exactly what he meant.

Spike didn’t give them the satisfaction of growling. He just flickered a tense half of his gaze over to her and canted an eyebrow. His expression basically said, ‘Sorry, Love. Pretty sure these blokes are a lost cause’. But he had that set look on his face now; the one that said that if she didn’t kill them, he planned to. 

He had that honor thing going right now. The one where he didn’t particularly cotton to assholes saying nasty things about his girls. It wasn’t that he didn’t think she couldn’t take care of the issue herself… he just kind of wanted to get his own licks in while they were at it.

Well, hell. “Last chance, Leatherface,” Buffy warned, low and intense. “This isn’t exactly the kind of thing I tend to kill for anymore. As far as I know, right now all you’re guilty of is attempted liquor-theft. But I’ve met some of your gang before, at a hellmouth. Maybe their behavior there was just really hellmouth-y, since God knows that place brought out the worst in everyone. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt here, since obviously not every demon in the world spends every night trying to start Armageddon or setting up baby banquets, so I’m willing to assume that you guys don’t spend every night breaking stuff and burning things either, and that all this rape stuff is just big talk.” She pulled out her stake and set herself grimly. “So, prove me wrong. Leave now. Go blow off steam somewhere _not_ here. Try cow-tipping or something, and get your bourbon at the store like everyone else… and my partner and I won’t have to end you.”

The demon-bikers were briefly nonplussed, as if they were listening to a talking mannequin. Behind Spike, the three distillery employees goggled, clearly stunned to see a petite woman about to throw in on this fight; and more than that, apparently prepared to take charge of it. She ignored them to judge the general reaction to her speech, aware that Spike was setting himself grimly across from her. 

He clearly didn’t think it was going to take.

“Little girl,” the head biker grated harshly, “after we take all the whiskey here and rape and kill you, and maybe your vampire, _and_ all the employees, we plan to head to the nearest bar, enjoy ourselves similarly with every female patron and maybe a few of the prettier males, then kill everyone there, turn their skulls into drinking vessels, and burn the place to the ground. And, hell; maybe we’ll play somewhere else after that, depending on how much of the night is left before we’re done. Because we’re _Hellions_ , and that’s how we _roll_ ; balls out till the day the Earth burns down, right boys?”

The rest of the bikers laughed in raucous, uneasy-making agreement.

Well, big talk or not, it was a statement of intent. “I’m really sorry to hear you say that, since otherwise you might have been able to live to party another day.” She didn’t really need to nod at Spike. He could feel the countdown in his blood.

He counted back; a thrumming inside her. And when their internal clocks went off she thought she saw a twitch of his scarred eyebrow before he gave a massive shove to the three humans behind him. _“Run!”_ he roared, and dove in, bottle swinging.

His attack, was of course, perfectly-timed to synch up with hers. It took the nasty biker douches by total surprise to be hit on both sides at once, and they reacted in wildly-disorganized fashion. 

It was the best thing about the battle, really, since the fight was a little off-putting at first. Spike was separated from her by all five of their adversaries. She had gotten so completely used to having him solidly at her left again that it was almost unsettling to fight naked once more. Added to that, she didn’t have a weapon with a long enough reach, and she was having to adapt ferociously to counter moves with things like a hairy, ripped-off section of pallet, and a broken barrel-stave, and a _thwapping_ , whipping length of flexible barrel-binding whistling past her ear—that could have taken her head off if she wasn’t all with the reflexes—and she was starting to get tunnel-vision, just reacting to each threat as it presented itself, one after the other without any real plan except to get back-to-back with Spike and soon. /The problem with non-vamps is they don’t just dust when you hit ‘em./ These jerks just kept getting back up.

Then she saw it. Spike had two of the bastards coming at him. She saw them through two other approaching bodies; one she had just taken down, getting back up to come back at her, and another, rearing up close for a second attack. She could barely focus on the demons in her own line of fire, though, because the ones coming after Spike both had wood in their hands; long, pointy, broken, jagged hunks of wood, and she saw it again. Hell-A, and Gunn, and Spike dusting, again and again in front of her eyes, and she couldn’t get close enough, she was too far away, and…

“Buffy, watch your back!”

She blocked out of sheer instinct, his terror for her swamping even that which she felt for him. Didn’t even turn; just swung up and caught whatever was coming down for her head. Yanked a leather-clad arm and jerked, bringing the creature over her shoulder to crash down atop the one looming in front of her. She didn’t have _time_ for this! Spike was…

She stalked forward, thinking of nothing but getting to him, as he struggled with his two assailants. That urgency was all. And it was stymied when she was pulled up short out of nowhere. One of the biker-demons reared up in front of her; right in her face and looking so like a memory that for a moment she was thrown back in time. Her tunnel-vision telescoped into a fuzzy-edged thing, and everything went primitive and singular. All thought vanished. All words escaped. Everything was bright and loud and all she knew was… there was something she was Called to do. Something… 

She had to…

She could feel _him_. There. Before her. Her mate was in need. And this one was in the way. 

She became walking death. 

The strangely-clad demon before her broke in her hands, and she swept forward. Her mate called. And then there was another, armed with a branch of some sort. It too expired in her grasp. She took the branch, drove it directly into and through the third. Ended it. Her mate was safe. Felt the surge of claim to tell her this. Turned to face the two others who still breathed. 

They fled, limping. No need to follow. Her mate was safe. That was All. She turned back. Found him. Grabbed his attire, dragged him close. Found his scent. 

He was well. His scent spoke of safety, and not of shed blood. A few small wounds, but nothing that bespoke true damage. 

She would claim him now.

“Buffy?” 

She had her hand on his neck. Yanked down, bringing him to where she might seal him to her. As was right. As was proper. Felt him respond, and… “Oh, bloody hell, Buffy… Not here, yeah? These people’ve had enough of a show without…”

His words made little sense, his protest less, but she permitted him to draw her around a darkened corner, to another side of the structure; away from the bodies of their combatants. Once done, though, she was finished with waiting, and pushed him to the wall. Dragged him down again, snuffling deep of the satisfying odors of his effort and his safety. Made sounds of approval. 

“Oh, Christ, Buffy…”

His words were unnecessary. He should speak to her in the ways she wished to hear them. Reaching up, she touched his face. Brushed his forehead in request that was just shy of demand. 

“Oh, bloody hell. Alright…” His bones moved, calling to her, and he slid into the face of her mate as he should be. 

Satisfied, she reared back. And bit down, hard. 

“Oh bloody Christ, oh God, oh fuck…” His knees buckled, and his fingers were digging hard into her now, as his blood touched her lips. “Buffy, I need… Oh, sodding fuck…”

Her hands were briefly confused on the closures of his garments, but she shortly remembered. Reprieved, he scrambled to remove the ones enclosing her body, at which point she swarmed aboard his lithe frame. Growled, clinging… and dragged herself down hard upon him as she ground her bite home. 

_“FUCK!”_ her mate bellowed, and swinging around, he drove her into the wall of the structure, slammed hard into her most satisfyingly; once, twice, thrice as he became lost in the fury of mating. She growled with him in the service of it, the power of his blood surging through her. Clamped down hard in service of the bond between them, to mark him, and bound him in her body till he howled with it.

And gloried in his release and her own as the shared finish rocked their claim.

***

“Fucking Christ, Buffy…” A chilled hand stroked her hair away from her face, tentative and amazed. She blinked, distantly aware that she was sitting in Spike’s naked lap on some sort of asphalt by some place that smelled really, really… alcoholish? Against a sort of a wall, in the dark, and… okay. She was large with the naked. At least from the waist down. “Um…”

“Oh, thank Christ; you’re back.”

“Back? From where?” The last thing she really remembered with any clarity was… fighting? And holy crap, if she’d already _been_ in a fight, why did she feel like she could take on a freight train single-handed right now? 

Shaking, her veins feeling like she had drunk about nineteen espressos, she struggled to sit up a little more. Spike lifted his hands to let her, but they hovered around her despite, seeming overtly solicitous. As she shifted, she came unstuck from him, and, yup, sex had definitely been had. Which wasn’t exactly unusual for them after a good fight, but… it was kind of unusual for her to, you know, not particularly remember it. 

The fighting, and the sex. Which, well… /The fighting could honestly probably blend in with any one of a zillion battles, I guess… but sex, when it comes to us, tends to be pretty memorable, generally-speaking. You’d think…/ “Did I get… knocked on the head or something?”

Spike pulled in a breath that sounded more than a little shaky. “No. I think, ah, what happened was, you saw and, ah, felt me in danger, and you… reacted. On a very instinctive level.”

His tentative tones, and the way the bond between them rippled, caught her attention in that way that stilled her, turned her head to face him. He was choosing his words way too carefully, for one thing, but that little ripple in the blood was… Okay, just really interesting. It was just so many parts wonder and, she thought, a memory of awe, and… intense pleasure? And concern, and maybe a little worry? “Spike, what happened?”

“Alright, Buffy, don’t get too upset, yeah, but I think maybe the part of you that’s a bit of a demon got a little riled up when it felt its mate… er… in danger. You sort of went berserk. Never seen you fight like that. Like a bloody switch got flicked. You just about tore those buggers in half gettin’ to me. Was like they weren’t half there. Then you dragged me over here and…” He bit his lip a little, his expression cautious. “Well, don’t take this the wrong way, pet, but that part of you wasn’t exactly in a ‘take no for an answer’ kind of mood, so…”

Horror hollowed her belly, and her hands started to shake. “Oh my God, you mean I…”

Spike grabbed her fingers immediately, crushed her palms together between his own. “No. Christ no. Buffy, it was absolutely fantastic. Sodding fabulous. I’m just sayin’… I think that part of you was… pretty intent on makin’ sure your mate was really okay, if you get what I mean? Like some real convincing evidence was in order, yeah?”

She could breathe again. God, one thing she could never, ever allow; not once, _ever_ again, was to use her strength against Spike to… But it sounded like… “You mean I… She… I mean, that part of me just wanted to…”

He tilted his head over, and despite the incredibly dim light, she saw it. And, wow. Talk about a serious bite. That wasn’t something she would normally do in her right mind. That was… 

Alright, that was pretty intense. No wonder she felt high as hell right now. “Um, and then we…”

“Mostly during.” A slow, wide grin spread across his face, and the bond rippled again. So did his voice, with a hoarse, sensuous quality that vanished all hesitancy. “Don’t mind sayin’ if you ever wanna bring that side of you out to play again, you’ve got an open invite, pet. That was… more’n a bit feral. And I’m okay with it.”

Frowning, Buffy lifted the edges of his shirt to inspect his ribs. She half expected at least a few other marks. After all, considering the look of that bite…

“Shoulders, Love. Leverage. Wasn’t time for much else.” He had that tone again; that smug, self-satisfied one that said a good time was very much had by all. One very happy demon-boy, right here. 

Well, fine. She was still a little embarrassed. “What, you’re saying I just… climbed up on you and started chowing down?”

That unfair tongue of his curled behind his teeth and clicked once, thoughtfully. “If I say yes, are you gonna get all blushy and schoolgirl on me and say it’s never gonna happen again?”

“If you start teasing me, I’ll get a complex and yes.”

The smirk turned to a pout. “Don’t be mean, pet. You can’t let the lioness out of her cage just the once. It’s not fair to either of us.”

She bit her lip and, with a sigh, hid her face in his throat. “No promises, since for one thing I have no freaking clue how it even happened…”

“Key seems to be putting me in jeopardy. Maybe if I just…” 

Her head snapped up, and she caught his face, hard, in her hand. Her fingers dug deep into his cheeks, and she glared fiercely into his eyes. “If you even finish that sentence I _will_ kill you. And no more fun Buffy demon-girl, e-ver.”

He sobered instantly, eyes mostly solemn on hers, though there might still have been a hint of a twinkle in there. And he, no shit, _pouted_ at her. “Spike is sorry. Bad Spike. No more say the bad thing.”

/Take this _seriously_ , you dork./ 

The twinkle and the pout vanished at her sharpened glare, which, damn straight. “Alright.” She released his now-sober face and dropped her hand. “Ugh. Where did my pants go, anyway?”

He snorted as he glanced uselessly around her body. “Love, I was paying exactly zero attention. But I’ll look.”

***

So. Okay. The three distillery guys were still peering around the corners in shock when they came back around the building, more or less put back together. And, well… they did a lot of staring at Buffy and Spike. Mostly Buffy, really, despite the fact that she thought Spike might have sported a little game face here and there during that tussle. But then for one thing, Spike had had his back to them for a lot of the fight, and for another… Girl. You know… that whole thing.

She wondered if they’d already called the cops, and what those guys would make of the bodies. Probably time to go, though hopefully these dudes were still so dumbfounded by everything they’d seen that they hadn’t really moved yet… or, alternatively just too terrified yet to go anywhere. 

Buffy knew how this would go. They were already in shock over the not-particularly-human-looking invaders. Spike was just a drop in the bucket after that. In comparison to all that, some girl fighting like she was seriously into MMA or had a guest-spot in a Lucy Liu flick was not so big a deal. 

Still, the staring was irritating, even if Buffy was pretty used to this sort of reaction. /They’ll get over it/ she reminded herself, not for the first time. By tomorrow the unfortunate human bystanders would be so busy trying to convince themselves that they hadn’t seen what they’d seen with the demons that they’d have managed convenient amnesia about most of the rest of it, too. Including that ‘a little girl’ had thrown huge guys like this across twenty feet of intervening space or whatever had ended up happening tonight. /Because apparently I’m just not gonna remember most of it./ “You guys okay?”

“Um… Yeah?”

Spike, ever the opportunist, grinned at the shell-shocked distillery employees. “So… You got a drink for a thirsty bloke? I broke the one bottle over that bastard’s head…” And he nodded to the head biker’s corpse. “Wouldn’t mind wetting my whistle. And m’ lady here could use a drink too…”

Buffy rolled her eyes at him. He clearly had no problem using her to wheedle another bottle or two out of these idiots if he could. 

It worked for him, of course. They walked out of there with four bottles, actually. Buffy even gave into his comically-beseeching puppy-dog look and carried two of them for him. “Nice night’s work, yeah?” And, grinning broadly, Spike cranked the first bottle open as they walked away. Flung the other occupied hand over her shoulders to gather her into the crook of his arm, head back to look up at the stars. Tossed back a long swig of the stuff, straight from the open bottle. “Mmmm… Bloody hell, that’s nice. Buffy, this has been a fine road trip, innit?”

“You’re in a good mood.”

He just smirked at her as they ascended the steps of the RV.

***

After that memorable interlude their cross-country trek continued without much of interest occurring. The ‘amber waves of grain’ were pretty much endless. And kind of dusty-looking, this time of year. And no one mentioned in those songs how corn smelled when it was sitting under the sun getting all hot. Like, seriously sweet. Rotting-sweet, mixed with the occasional huge waft of tons of manure when they passed those gigantic yards where cows were raised, and the huge warehouse-barns where, Spike informed them, half-choking, pigs were kept in probably horrible conditions, judging by the stench. How people lived with that smell was beyond Buffy, and she had only a marginally-better sense of smell than most humans. Dawn was having enough problems with human-standard olfactory receptors. Buffy was fairly sure she herself would pass out if she didn’t breathe shallowly, through her mouth. 

Spike looked like he was dying, and he wasn’t even breathing. It was the longest she had ever seen her guy go without inhaling… and if she had ever needed any evidence of his peculiarity in that regard, she had it now. From the tight emotions held in check between them it was causing him some weird, unspecified psychological pain not to breathe, whether he needed to or not. Which, note to self to ask him about that sometime later on. She had always wondered about his whole weird, non-vampirical insistence on the habit.

It was a thing, though, because the farms went on for long enough—literally, miles and miles—that Spike did eventually give in here and there to go into the occasional, odd spasm of reflexive gasping, at which point he actually gagged, and looked as disgusted and nauseous as a vampire could possibly look. “Fucking, bloody, sodding Christ…”

By the third trip around that nasty little carousel, Buffy couldn’t watch it anymore. Though still mystified by the whole thing, she took pity on him and went and got one of her halter-tops, and basically tied it around his face like a little Buffy-smelling bandanna. 

The look of gratitude that act earned her was all out of proportion to the gift, and kind of made her realize some things. Like, yeah, okay… he’d stolen a few of her shirts—and stuff—over the early days of his crushing on her. She had thought he’d been doing gross things with them, and had been horrified, disgusted… and maybe secretly amazed that anyone could get so fixated on yours truly. /But… that really wasn’t the point, was it?/ Not that she doubted he had had a few moments alone, sure. But… well, she knew a lot more now about how fundamental sense of smell was for vampires, how integral that sense was to their wellbeing. It was essential to how they made sense of their universe. Vision was absolutely secondary. Smell, taste, and touch were primary and utterly vital; and having been without the latter two, early on…

Being able to smell her had been all Spike had had to feel close to her. Having something of hers hadn’t been about perving. It had been about massive, overwhelming loneliness for a creature who needed touch to survive, and had been living without any, really. 

/It was about feeling like… I was there. Pretending I was there./ Because he had had nothing else, and she had been his everything. He had made her his entire world. 

Realizing things like that could make a person a little gooshy inside, even belatedly.

Escaping out of the flats and into the rain-shadow of the Rockies was a reprieve. The austere beauty of the land just before those high peaks was really soothing in its own way; kind of like the desert back home… and then, once you began to ascend into all the trees it was like heading into another universe. And it just. Kept. Going. _Up_. Like they were trying to find the ceiling of the world. Kind of amazing. 

The air kept getting thinner. Dawn spent a lot of time gasping whenever they left the RV to stretch, and generally acting exhausted or half-passed-out the rest of the time. Buffy had to admit she was having issues with it too, since she’d spent most of her life as sea-level girl. 

Spike looked like he could wrestle mountain lions. The jerk. He was probably just happy to be away from the farms. “Better?” she asked at one point as they drove with their backs to the morning sun.

“You have no sodding idea. Bloody hell.”

Trailing her fingers along the back of his neck, she couldn’t hold it in anymore. “So… why are you such a dedicated breather, anyway?” she asked lightly.

The question earned her a swift, sidelong glance, and finally a little sigh. “Used to fish in the brook near our country estate when I was a lad. Fell in once. Damn near drowned. My man dragged me out before I could finish the job…” He caught her look of incomprehension and shrugged slightly. “My valet, Buffy.”

/Your… God, how rich _were_ you?/ A country estate and… and a _valet?_ That was like… a word from a regency romance novel about lords and crap. 

“Anyway, know you know what it is to drown. How it stays with you.”

It tore her away from her contemplation of his other life. It was unimportant anyway. _This_ was. “Yeah.” She knew. She definitely knew.

He nodded, eyes front and avoiding her gaze. “Then… watchin’ Mum… Her struggle against the consumption… Sometimes I’d sit beside her when she’d have a bad attack, hold her hand and catch myself breathing deep next to her, prayin’. Like maybe I could force air into her lungs if I could just… _breathe_ for her. I’d already lost a brother to pneumonia or some sort of flu—fever and ague, we called it then—and I’d had illnesses like that myself. Everyone did, back then. Croup an’ the like. No medicines, like now, to ease them. You just got on, or died.” He shrugged, shook his head like he was shaking it off. “Bein’ buried brought it all back. Guess that clinched it. Doesn’t much seem to matter that I don’t _need_ to breathe. Still feel I must, if that makes any sense.”

/Oh./ Involuntarily, her fingers dug hard into his shoulder. Childhood fevers, then drowned, lost a mother… and finally buried alive; or, near enough to it to count, anyway. God, did all their experiences have to echo each other? How much did they have in common? “I… definitely get that.” So damned much had conspired, in her vampire, to keep him so incredibly human… and to make him fit her.

“Bleedin’ First knew it,” he finished in a low whisper. “When It was tormentin’ me down there, the bitch had the bloody Turok-Han drown me over and bloody over again. Knowin’ it wouldn’t kill me didn’t make me panic any soddin’ less.”

/Oh, _God_./ Just the thought that that thing had been doing… _that_ to him, down there, for a week, in between brutal beatings, while she had huddled safely upstairs in the house picking up strays was… “Spike…”

He shook his head to cut off anything she might have said. “S’ okay, Buffy. Just… Thought maybe you thought it was an affectation or summat, but… It’s just how I’m made, yeah? Can go without eating, obviously. Don’t much like it, but can do. Would miss the flavors is all, even if they’re a bit different now, for me, to what they were." His lips twitched then. "Could maybe go without whiskey…” And he shot her a faint smile. “Dunno if I could give up fags. I’d have to find some other thing to do with my mouth and fingers to keep my head clear, every minute of the day.”

She slapped him, very lightly, on the back of said head, because he was a dope, and also because she knew her guy, and he was nothing if not the king of oral fixations. 

“Breathing, though,” he murmured, and shook his head slightly. “It’s still a part of me.”  
  
“Well,” she answered softly, “if we ever have to pass through another bad industrial area, I have lots of stuff you can wear like a gas mask.”

With a low sigh, he leaned his head back against her breast, eyes narrowed to watch the winding mountain highway from under his lowered lashes. “‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.’”

“Okay?”

“I’m so bloody in love with you, Buffy.”

She dug her fingers into his scalp, rolled his head a little against her sternum. “I know. I’m pretty crazy about you, too.”

“Must be, if you’re willing to let me use your frilly underthings to save me having to hold my breath like a tosser…”

“Well, I don’t know if I said anything about underthings. I mean, if we ever got pulled over and we had to explain that to a cop… ‘Hi officer. I don’t know why he’s wearing lingerie over his face. No, he’s not a very twisted bank-robber…’”

Spike grinned broadly at this image. “Think maybe you’ve stumbled onto a fine way to rob a bank, pet. Everyone would be so soddin’ distracted by seein’ the adorable, lacy things you like to wear, strapped across a man’s face, they’d not notice what was happening back by the vault…”

“You can put the soul into the demon, but you can’t take the demon out of the…”

“Hey! I don’t know what you two are talking about up there, but keep it down! Some of us are trying to sleep, and I _definitely_ didn’t need to wake up hearing anything about Buffy’s underwear or about bank-robbing!” Dawn hesitated. “Unless I get to help. Because if I get to rob a bank, I think I’m kinda down.”

Buffy sighed, feeling put-upon. “Go back to sleep, Dawn.”

***  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Next stop, Berkeley, which... We'll deal with Kenny rather quickly, and move on to some other stuff that's honestly far more interesting than that little twerp, at least for my money.


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, let's deal with Kenny and this giant-business and get that over with, so we can move on to more important matters... like what shape will this family fit into as we progress with the tale, stuff like that?

They hit up a hospital in Salt Lake City for expired blood, Buffy making up some kind of random story about a blood drive for an anemic relative. The people there were kind of sticky about it, making her wonder if SLC was just really low on vamps. She had never had any hospital act so weirded out by her request before. Usually there was at least one person on duty back there who was totally used to the unspoken vamp-economy and just sort of fudged the blood-disposal forms, nodded, and didn’t ask questions. These ones were all ‘do you have paperwork, do you have a permit, do you have a doctor’s order?’ In the end she kind of had to get threatening, and basically rob them and force them to take the cash she was shoving in their faces. Which was, you know, less fun, and they really should’ve gotten blood in Louisville or Kansas City, or did the mortuary thing instead. 

She just really didn’t trust the crappy little fridge in the motorhome to keep it for very long, was the thing, so long distances were out, and so was older blood. 

At least it did have one, though. And a microwave, which was handy. Their bus back in Europe hadn’t had all those handy conveniences.

Not that Spike used the latter when she returned to regale them with the saga of her irritation. He just tore hungrily into the first packet without even heating it, muttering as he did about how the city was “too bloody orderly”, and “even the punks here go to church”. 

/Okay?/ “The blood’s still good, though, right?”

“Good as hospital shite ever is, and just thrummin’ with goodwill. Let’s get the bloody hell out of here.”

Apparently he wasn’t a fan of this town.

After another endless trek through the Nevada desert, and a nice, really gorgeous stint in their last set of mountains, they finally descended out of the Sierra Nevadas and into what smelled, unmistakably, like the state of Buffy’s birth. She found herself dragging in long draughts of air scented with the faint odors of mesquite and creosote bush and sandstone, asphalt and sun-baked earth, scrub-oak and distant sequoias, eucalyptus, and the faintest, far off tinge of probably-imagined ocean, like a person pulling at a canteen after months lost in a wasteland. 

They were midway through the fourth morning, the sun still at their well-foiled backs, and California had never looked so gorgeous.

At least to her. Dawn, of course, started muttering anxiously along about Sacramento, making noises about how much she’d learned about the US just on this short cross-country trip, and how probably she should just keep traveling with them if she wanted to get an education. At which point, before Buffy could even start in on her, Spike silenced her with a single, sharp comment. “Bit, you’re not gettin’ out of facin’ the lad, so you might as well resign yourself. We’ve come all this way, yeah?” He swung the wheel in a long arc to skirt the capital city and keep them on I-80. “I’m not leavin’ again till I can fit you in somethin’ has power steering.”

Dawn sighed and subsided back into her spot in the rear of the motorhome, but it was clear from the way she lay that she was more dreading the end of the trip than disgruntled about the whole ‘go back to college’ thing.

They had to hang around outside of San Fran for their standard five-hour hiatus, RV broadside to the westering sun while they waited for the glowing orb to settle below the horizon. Along about seven, once there was no chance of horizontal rays hitting him over the top of their conveyance, Spike exited the structure to join them outside. He immediately leaned against the wall to have a smoke, eyes focused on his girls hovering under the shade of the scraggly trees here in their last pit stop. “So. We all set with the plan?”

Buffy nodded and shot a pointed glare at her recalcitrant sister. “Very. _Right_ , Dawn?”

Dawn crossed her arms. “Like I have a choice.”

Spike tilted his head back against the warm tin of the RV. “You’ll be fine, Niblet. This’ll all be over in a tick.”

“Says you! You’re not the one who has to face down a guy you cheated on and, like, beg him for _mercy_ …”

Buffy sighed heavily and shot Spike a ‘do I really have to do this?’ look. Spike sent her back a fairly unhelpful lift of eyebrows and a quick not-quite-smile twitch of the lips before readdressing his cigarette; essentially saying, ‘I fielded the last one. Your bloody turn, pet’. 

Le sigh. “Dawn, look. How long were you and Kenny dating?”

Dawn shot her a startled look. “A couple of weeks. Why?”

Buffy struggled with it. Because, yes; at Dawn’s age, her beliefs had been just about as black and white. If you were dating someone, you were strictly monogamous to that relationship. But… Dammit, they’d barely _been_ in a relationship, had probably maybe gone on a couple coffee dates and, knowing how college was, mostly hung out in the dorms eating pizza together and laughing over bad TV or awful comedy flicks with a half-dozen other kids. Had they even discussed…

Probably not. “Okay… do you think that means you _owed_ Kenny anything? I mean, did you promise him that he was the one who got to… you know…”

Dawn looked suddenly at sea. _“No!_ I mean, no, we so weren’t even _there_ yet. But we _were_ dating, and he told me he liked me for weeks before that, so it was like I totally broke his heart, and…”

/Oh, jeez./ “He didn’t own you, Dawn, just because you went on a few dates; no matter how he felt about you. You get to make your own decisions about who you want to be with…”

“Even if you think the other bloke’s bloody awful for the girl,” Spike muttered, “doesn’t mean you get to say a bleedin’ thing. Even if you hate the bastard. Her decision. Not your place.” 

/Thanks, Spike. I think./ “Okay, yeah; maybe you two should have had a conversation first about whether or not it was, you know, the kind of relationship that was going in that direction; you know, an exclusively you and him thing…”

“Does he work in construction, like,” Spike prodded, grinning.

“What?” Dawn asked, thrown.

Without looking or batting an eye, Buffy threw an empty soda can at him. It hit the stupid vampire, very satisfyingly, point-blank in the center of his chest, thoroughly shutting him up. _“And,”_ she went on firmly, “if you felt like you wanted to look at other options, maybe it might have been nicer to discuss it with him first; but going on some dates with someone doesn’t mean he gets to put a stamp on you that says ‘Property of Kenny’.” /Not that I don’t get it, since it wasn’t like I was gonna sleep with Mr. Blond Construction, Spike, and I think you knew it, you smug, jealous bastard…/ 

The thing was, she totally got it, where Dawn was at. But the difference was… Buffy _had_ been sleeping with Spike, then, and had been for quite some time. Her situation was a whole other ball of wax. Heck; she knew that some people would've considered the thing with Spike back then to have been fair game, if all they were doing--on paper anyway--was sex and only sex, supposedly without a "relationship" to back it. Spike had thus followed all stated rules, hadn't done more than snipe at her when her friends had tried to throw Richard at her, and acted as if he considered her free to do what she wanted with her body. 

He wouldn’t have liked it in the slightest, of course, if she had gone out with, much less slept with, someone else. It would have crushed his heart to tiny shreds of dust and completely destroyed his self-worth… but he wouldn’t have thought it in any way outside her rights as an individual. No more than it had been outside his to sleep with Anya, or that one black-haired demon girl, no matter how much those had hurt. Of course, she would have been beyond pissed, and definitely destroyed if he’d done it while they’d been… 

/The thing being, he wouldn’t have, and I wouldn’t have. Not while we…/ For one thing, she just wasn't made that way, and neither was he, whatever she had told herself back then. They had both known how hard she was lying to herself about their situation; because she would never have slept with Spike in the first place if there hadn't been more. /Hell, I tried to make it more with Parker, and he was sleeping with half the campus, didn't care if I did the same./ 

Which was pretty much where Dawn and Kenny were at, as far as Buffy could currently determine. Just loosely dating, whatever this Kenny kid might have wanted out of it. /College-dating; except Dawn wasn't even sleeping with Kenny, so they weren't even at Parker-level./ More than that, Dawn had had no stated intention of taking doing so. Which meant that this situation was entirely different than real relationship-level navigation. 

Still... /There was a reason even Spike and I weren't on the same page about that idiot Richard. Like, that he even thought I would... Dammit, you have to have _conversations_ about this stuff!/ "Dawn, I dated a guy in college. You know, we had coffee, deep soulful talks, yadda. I thought we were exclusive because we slept together. I found out afterward that to him it was just a fling, and he was also flinging with approximately half the campus. That for him it was just good, clean fun, and he didn't get why I was let down or hurt that he was also dating however many other girls. He legit expected me to be dating other guys too, and probably also sleeping with them." She glanced away from Dawn's gaping stare. "You literally have to talk about this stuff, because other people can totally have way different expectations of what you mean by 'dating'." She shrugged it off, this thing that had once caused her an inordinate amount of pained rejection. "You can't just assume everyone's definitions are the same. Otherwise, someone's always gonna end up getting hurt." 

Dawn looked completely flummoxed. Her eyes darted first to Spike, as representative both of the wronged sex, and probably the wronged species-category, then to Buffy’s, as representative of her own, in a general sense. “You think I didn’t do anything wrong?”

Spike exhaled hard and kicked his booted foot back against the motorhome’s thin, corrugated side, hard enough for it to warp a little and make a hollow _wuh-wuh_ noise. “Look, Bit. I'm not gonna speak to that Parker git. Big sis and I've already gone rounds about him..."

Buffy made a noise Spike correctly interpreted, because he winced, just a tiny bit, in the corner of one eye, and hustled along. "In my time, it was expected of men to offer the same fidelity to women as women were expected to offer to men. You weren’t a gentlemen if you pressed her for sex, or engaged in any carnal act with a women without the benefit of marriage. Even if she was your intended, it was hands off before the wedding…”

Dawn was goggling at him, clearly amazed at this chaste picture. His mouth twisted in what Buffy knew was old self-disgust. “Granted, that was a long bloody time ago, and no doubt most tossers weren’t so circumspect as…” He stumbled briefly. “…As the most principled among us. But that was the expectation.” 

Buffy hid a tiny smile behind an a suddenly ‘itchy’ lip, rubbing it with her sleeve out of determination not to out him at the minuscule slip. He ostentatiously avoided her eyes as he went on.

“…And even though I’ve seen a bit since, I’d say that in modern terms I’m still a hair offended that women are so often held to a different standard than men nowadays. Give that Parker sod his due..." He shot Buffy a faintly apologetic glance. "...At least he played fair. Because I think it’s a bit of a rum go that a bloke can date five chits at a time and no one says boo, but a girl does it and the world comes to a bloody end…” 

Dawn stared at him like he’d grown another head.

/Oh, jeez./ Buffy probably would never have questioned it herself, if it hadn't been for that asshole, but now that she thought about it, at least he was being equal-opportunity? Interesting. That thought had honestly never occurred to her. /How very open-minded of you, Parker, to not care if I also banged every other guy on campus. Parker the Feminist./ “I guess..." Buffy caught her sister's eye. Remember Joey on _Friends?_ None of us really batted an eye when he did it, but…”

“Ooooh,” Dawn broke in, comprehension striking. “Yeah, and then when Chandler dated that one girl who did the same thing, everyone was all shocked; like, _what?”_

Spike did a kind of a half-shrug. “Just sayin’, Niblet. Should be the same standard for both, for all of me. You were scarce dating the lad. For all he knew, you were tryin’ on three or four other blokes as well, to see which one fit best. God knows you’d given him no reasonable expectation to think you were exclusive yet, had you?”

Dawn frowned, looking somewhat confused. “Well, no, but… I mean, we just hadn’t even talked about any of that stuff, so…”

“Well then.” Spike subsided with a wave of his hand, as if dismissing the entire conversation.

Dawn rounded on Buffy, frowning. “Do _you_ think I did anything wrong?”

Buffy struggled with it, trying to decide if she thought Spike had made a good point, or if this was one of those ‘weird vampire immoral logic’ moments. Not to mention, once upon a time, it had been she who had been on the 'wronged' side of that equation, at least emotionally. 

But, well... ‘Wrong’ was such a touchy term right now, since using it might scar Dawn in ways that Buffy knew all too well might stick with her and screw her up for years. She didn’t want that for her sister because of one mistake. /Yours truly knows all about that kind of baggage. And about handing it out./ Because she had also been on the other side. 

Exhaling shakily, Buffy set her feet, because this was where the ground got unsteady. “I think it sucks that you hurt his feelings,” she began after a moment, feeling her way carefully. /Been there, done that, got the Parker-Special t-shirt./ “I think it really sucks that you didn’t talk first about what kind of relationship you actually had or planned to have with him; but that kind of thing comes with growing up a little and getting more relationship skills. God knows that takes time, so I think you get a pass on that, because you have to learn it somewhere. Mostly from making mistakes that hurt people by accident.” /Which, guess where I learned it. There, and... later, with the guy _I_ hurt afterward./ She made a face and did her best to avoid Spike’s eyes, because this next part hit a little closer to home. “I think that it sucks even more that he thought it was about what he is, and not about just, you know, that you had a fling.”

Spike mad a sound of distant but violent agreement from his post against the RV.  
  
/Yeah. Well./ “I definitely think it was not the best thing ever that it was with his roommate, since it sounds like they aren’t exactly the best of friends… But no. I don’t think you were, like, wearing an engagement ring or something just because you dated the guy for a couple weeks; especially when you never told him you were in the market to have sex with him in the first place.” Leaning in, she touched her sister’s very large hand. “You get to decide who you sleep with, Dawn. No matter what, okay? Just… try to navigate people’s feelings a little better next time and you’ll be fine.”   
  
Dawn pulled in a long breath and let it out. With it went what looked like a whole lot of tension, a whole lot of shame. And she nodded. “Okay.” She lifted her downcast eyes, relocated her gaze to meet Buffy’s. “You know you’re gonna scare him to death when you show up at the dorm, right? I told him who my sister is. He’s gonna think you’re there for revenge or something.”

Spike smirked behind her and blew a bunch of smoke out into the lengthening shadows. “‘Bout time the younger generation remembers some respect for their elders.”

“Oh, man…”

***

Buffy stood before the door of Kenny and Nick’s room in Freeborn Hall and sucked in a breath filled with familiar scents. Really, did all college dorms smell the same? Like not-entirely-well-washed-laundry, old paint, thin windows, dust, and… teenagers? Also, did they all _sound_ the same? The low-level cacophony of drifting music from seven rooms at once—Alternative from one room, Hip-Hop from another, a little Latin from a third, some kind of bizarre jam-band from a fourth with the college station DJ talking over it about the head-trip of experimental music… and the ubiquitous Reggae from at least three others—mixed with the sounds of cheerful, shouted conversations and less-cheerful demands that someone shut the hell up because people were trying to study… It was all super recognizable, and basically unchanged.

It kind of made her homesick for UC Sunnydale. “Alrighty then,” she addressed her mate with grim determination. “Ready to empathize and intimidate?”

“Got it in the wrong order, Love.” Spike was wearing human visage right now, but the game face was lying in wait, held ready to spring it on a poor, unsuspecting Kenny at a moment’s notice. Tough love and all that good stuff. 

“Just don’t scare him off before we actually get him outside to where Dawn is.”

“I know the drill, Buffy. Only you better not do the same. I just have teeth. You’re the hell of a lot more terrifying to any demon than I ever was.” 

He had a point. Lifting her hand, she knocked... and threw him a look that, for her, was just a hair coquettish. “Who? Little ol’ me?”

_“Who’s there?”_

“Don’t be daft, pet,” Spike muttered at her, and angled a tolerant look at the ceiling. 

“Kenny?” she called through the door. “Open up.” They were gambling on Kenny being alone in there. Dawn had said that he would have come back from his science club meeting around nine on Tuesday nights, and Nick, she said, tended to be gone almost every night till close to midnight, jamming with his band. 

A rustle could be heard from inside, and when the voice sounded again from within it was much nearer the door. “Who is it?”

“Dawn’s older sister, and a friend of hers. Which means you know you better open it, or we will.”

A very profound silence reigned from behind the panel, and then it cracked just a tad, and a deeply frightened-looking blue eye peeped through the gap, along with a hank of longish blond hair. “Uh… Hi?”

Buffy fought not to roll her eyes. Jeez, he sounded so _young_. “Just open the door, Kenny.”

“Um, don’t take this the wrong way, but are you here to beat me up, b…because if you are, I have magicks to p…protect m…myself, and I c…can totally portal you away from m…me if you…”

/Oh, jeez with the baby demon bravado./ “We’re not here to beat you up. We just wanna talk.”

Another short silence, then, “Okay, b…but you’re the…” His voice lowered significantly. “The Slayer. Like, _the_ Slayer. I mean, forgive me if I just don’t wanna take that risk.”

“You’re damn right she’s _the_ Slayer, infant,” Spike broke in, clearly impatient, “and you’re bloody lucky she’s willing to give you a decent hearing instead of just ripping your sodding head off for what you did to our Niblet. So get your slimy thricewise arse out of there and come talk to us, _and_ Dawn, before we rip you in half enough you don’t regenerate, yeah?”

The door cracked a little wider, and the shocked blue eye jerked to take in the second of Kenny’s two visitors. “Who’re _you?”_

Buffy glanced up and down the hall. Saw a couple of kids lounging at the far end, near a window, not looking their way at all. They had their heads together, and she thought she smelled a hint of marijuana over there, so no doubt they were going to mind their own business. No one else was in evidence. It was as good a time as any. 

She nodded at Spike.

Given the go-ahead, he tilted his head a little at Kenny. And vamped. Just a quick flash of fang and bumpies before the game face vanished, but it was enough. Kenny yelped and jerked back. “Oh! What…”

“Wanted you to know who all Dawn has in the family. Not entirely her fault, yeah, that she likes the leather-and-cigarettes type, since she grew up associating with Big Bad, here.”

Kenny just stared, jaw hanging open. After approximately a full half-minute of gaping, he found his voice. “Grew… up…” He blinked then, bringing Buffy back into focus. “Wait! You’re…” He stared through the now much-more-open door at the visiting Slayer, clearly floored. “But, he’s…” 

“It’s a long story. It can wait till we get to Dawn.”

That seemed to arrest him. “Wait. Dawn’s… _here?”_

He must have missed that the first time around. “She’s waiting for us over under some trees inside the quad. You know, since she can’t fit inside of any buildings.” A flicker of shame flitted over the kid’s face, steeled back to determination. Oh, hell no. “You have _no_ idea how long it took us to get here, since we had to take a freighter from Europe with an understanding demon crew and a specially-made toilet she could fit into, and camp everywhere in a huge RV and in big buses before that, because she can’t fit into anything regular-sized.”

He winced, shrinking back into the dorm room. The battered, faux-oak décor with its cluttered surfaces and standard Pink Floyd posters didn’t do much to shield him. He looked like he was about to retreat, which didn’t seem like the best idea. Buffy could also see what looked like a few magickal items around; something that looked vaguely totemic on top of the visible dresser on what appeared to be an altar, with a little incense, and, just, yeah. He was a dangerous little shit, that was for sure. 

The other side of the room, interestingly, looked empty. “Nick move out?”

Kenny blinked, arrested mid-flight. “What? Oh, yeah. We had a big blowout and I asked housing for… I thought I’d have to do a spell, but since it’s Summer Session they found him another…” He glared then, like he thought he could blow them off. “Look, I actually have a ton of homework to do, so can’t this wait till…”

“No,” Buffy insisted, “it actually can’t, since Dawn has to head back out of town soon to where we camped because _she can’t fit into any bathrooms_ , and also we’re gonna fix this before we leave the city because it’ll be winter soon and she _can’t go inside to get out of the snow_ where we’re living.” This little brat was really starting to get on her nerves. However badly his little demon-y feelings had been hurt, he’d gotten his revenge and then some. This was starting to become an actual life-or-death issue, and he needed to get over himself. 

Kenny looked amazed at her angry pronouncement. “I didn’t really think of…that,” he stuttered after a second. “I mean, I just…” He wiggled his fingers and trailed off, sounding super embarrassed, but at least he had stopped trying to retreat back into his dorm to hunt for some spell to cast in their general direction. Selfish little bastard. 

“Yeah, well, you’re thinkin’ of it now,” Spike informed him, as pissed as Buffy was, and grabbed the little shit’s arm. “C’mon. Off we go.” And he tugged his fellow demon out of his dorm before he could get any funny ideas.

Buffy secured his other arm the minute he was out of the door, brought the kid into lockstep between them. “Don’t worry, Kenny,” she told him, and patted the kid’s hand. “Just think of it as mediation.”

Kenny shivered, clearly intimidated as hell. “I want you to know that I’m doing this under protest. I was the one who was cheated on…”

Spike growled; a low, vicious sound in the late-night cacophony of the dormitory. Their young friend fell very, very silent after that.

They hustled their charge out through the inside door to the quad and into the moonlight. Half-dragged him under the trees lining the southern end of the vast, tiled atrium to where Dawn lurked under the branches. 

He reared back, clearly shocked, when he saw her; all fifteen feet of her and counting, hovering over him amongst the treetops. He really looked like he was going to shit himself when she straight up picked him up off the ground, plucked from between her sister and Spike with effortless grace to lift him in front of her face. “Hey, Kenny. Long time no see.”

“Oh. H…hey, D…Dawn…”

“So. Did you know I was just gonna keep growing?” It was said in a light, conversational tone, Dawn’s head tilted curiously as she held her ex-boyfriend in front of her face. “I’m kinda wondering if there’s, you know, some kind of programmed end to the curse. You know, a plan; like am I supposed to stop at twenty feet? Thirty?”

Kenny blushed madly in the moonlight. “I d…didn’t… I mean… I just…” He looked around himself at the ground, his feet dangling a good six feet below. “C…could you put me down?”

“Maybe,” Dawn answered sweetly. “I’ll think about it. So.” Moving out of the branches a little so that she could see without bumping her head, she plunked herself lightly onto the soft, bark-littered ground below the trees. “Let’s talk, Kenny.”

Still held in hands about the size of baseball gloves and with his toes only barely brushing the soil, Kenny stammered. “Uh, okay?”

“I know I hurt you. I get that you were really into me. And yeah, we were dating. And I probably should have told you I wasn’t ready for things yet. And you should know that I really, really liked you. Probably that was part of the problem. I might even have loved you, but… You were too good to me. You liked me too much…”

Kenny had that look on his face like he was on a ride that was really going too fast for him. “I…”

“And the thing was, it didn’t have anything to do with you. Not with you being a demon, or with him being human, okay? I mean, look at Spike, here. I grew up around demons. You _know_ that. My model for a good boyfriend is a demon….”

Spike grunted and muttered something about only seeing the good parts. Buffy elbowed him in the short ribs to shut him up. 

“But then why…”

“Because Nick was a bad-boy in leather. Because you were too good to me. Because I have my own issues that have nothing to do with you; issues about whether I’m worth anyone loving me if I’m just…” She cut off. “Well, that’s a longer story. Let’s just say I’ve seen people die for me and I have issues with self-worth.”

/Well, that answers the question about whether she’s out to her ex about her, ah, origins./

“And okay, Kenny…” Dawn shot Buffy a pleading look, her voice faltering. 

Buffy nodded back firmly, because this part Kenny really needed to hear. /Say it, Dawn. _Believe_ it, because it’s true./

Dawn made a face. “Look. We were dating, but we never agreed that, you know, we were exclusive, or that our relationship was going somewhere sexual, right?”

Kenny jerked back, looking shocked. “But… we were _dating!_ That means you don’t get to touch other guys!”

/Don’t kill the very small demon, don’t kill kids, don’t do it Buffy…/ Reaching out, she caught Spike’s wrist to curtail the low, rumbling snarl issuing from his throat.

Luckily, the kid’s reckless, piggish pronouncement had done its work. Dawn’s temper flared. “You don’t own me, Kenny. It’s my body. And what you’re doing to it now is really, really unfair.”

He gaped at her, clearly stunned.

Dawn pressed the advantage, swelling with a new power as the remains of the shame she had been carrying dropped away. “Look. I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. I’m sorry we didn’t talk about it, and I’m sorry that you thought it was because of a reason it wasn’t. It wasn’t about you being a thricewise, and it wasn’t about Nick being human. It was about my stuff, okay? And I think if you needed emotional revenge, you already got it. My life has been a living hell for months now, alright? I’m taking baths in lakes and peeing in buckets and sleeping on stone floors outside and freaking out about getting frostbite in the winter, and wearing blankets for clothes, and hiding from people so they won’t be scared of me… and do you have any idea how much it costs to _feed_ me? They don’t _make_ a deodorant big enough for a giant, and it’s _August!_ ” 

At every hammer-blow in the recitation, the little bastard flinched harder, which, good. Seeing it, Dawn set him gently on his feet; almost as if she’d forgotten that she’d been holding him aloft. Her voice lowered to something quieter, gentler. “Kenny, just… look. I’m sorry I made you feel inadequate or whatever, but can we just say we’re sorry to each other and get over it? Admit we’ve both learned something, shake hands and move on? Be adults or something?”

The blond kid stared down at the ground beneath his feet. “I’m so mad at you, Dawn. I guess I’m just… really hurt.” 

“Well, I’m not feeling at my best either, okay?”

He nodded at nothing. “But… I guess I’m sorry too. That you had to go through… all that. Maybe… it was a lot.”

“Understatement of the century,” Buffy interrupted blandly.

Kenny’s head swiveled around to meet the two uncompromising gazes, a half-glare on his young, stubborn face. “So I guess the thing is, if I don’t fix you, your sister and your vampire friend will crush and drain me or something?”

Spike had clearly had enough. He pulled out a cigarette. “You had any honor, you little shit, you’d’ve already fixed the problem. As it is, I think Buffy should pound the life out of you, but then I’m just a fan of watching her go to. She does it with such unbelievable style… and it’s been a long while. She doesn’t make a habit of beatin’ up demons anymore unless they’ve supremely earned it.” He lit up and pulled in a drag. “For you I think she’d make an exception,” he continued, smoke trailing from his nostrils. He blew the rest out blissfully. “Any road, no one’s gonna drain you. Thricewise blood’s like cold dirt treacle, and no amount of glamor’s gonna change that.” He shot a smirk Buffy’s way. “Whaddya say, Slayer? Dawn holds him down while you start pullin’ out fingernails, find out from him which one of those bloody idols of his I need to fetch from his flat?”

Kenny went pale, shot Buffy a hunted look. “Look; I can so go get the right stuff myself…”

Buffy frowned at him. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m not sure we can trust you. You might just curse all of us, or vanish or something.”

“Why would I…”

It was time. Buffy nodded imperceptibly at Spike, and he took the baton, turning from bad cop to good cop. “Look, lad. I’ve been where you are, alright? I was in love with the Slayer for years, and she wouldn’t give me the time of day. Only stood to reason, right? Bloodthirsty demon, demon-Slayer. Made no sodding sense….” Kenny was staring at him as if he’d lost his damn mind, but then, that was the general demonic reaction whenever either of them admitted to the nature of their relationship. It was only going to get more mind-blowing for the kid the longer he listened. “Watched her date human blokes as had no idea what they had and had no business touchin’ a woman like her, blokes who thought they were better’n me just for bein’ human, an’ had to do nothing about it. And when we finally got it together…” Kenny jerked at that, eyes darting from one to the other of them in utter shock. 

/Yeah, it’s like that, Kenny. This is Dawn’s model. Deal with it./

“…I had to put up with a bunch of puffed-up humans constantly telling me I was garbage for touching her, yeah?” Spike went on. Leaned forward, getting right into the kid’s face. “And I knew the whole time that she didn’t love me. More’n that; I couldn’t _make_ her, whatever we were to each other.”

“But…” Kenny protested, clearly aghast.

“But the thing _is_ ,” Spike rode over him, fierce and grim, “it was _always_ her choice. If she wanted me, did she want someone else… _Her_ choice. _Her_ body, _her_ heart. Whatever I felt for her, whatever we were to each other, I had no more right to her than she gave me, and that’s the end of it. Her body. Her heart. End of, yeah?” He leaned back. “Now we’re together, and she’s given me both, and I’m bloody lucky. But I don’t own her, even with all that.”

“But…”

“No. She owns herself, even still, to give or to take away as she sees fit. And me, givin’ myself to her? That’s my own choice too.” Spike dropped his cigarette butt to the dirt, ground it out under his heel. “Here’s the wisdom of the ages, thricewise. Picked it up over a hundred-plus years, so you better listen. _No_ one owns anyone else. Thinkin’ you do? That’s slavery, and you don’t want that. I’ve been that, under a blood-leash, and all that leads to is resentment, bein’ owned. Lot of bloody pain.”

/Ouch./ The very starkness of it struck to the heart.

“Learn to have a sodding conversation,” Spike advised flatly, and nodded up at Dawn. “Whatever your relationship. Don’t assume, or take what hasn’t been given free and clear. And never think you own anyone. Never think they own you. Figure that out and you’ll get through life a lot easier.” 

/Thank you, Spike./ He was always the eloquent one. Her beautiful, articulate vampire. “Here endeth the lesson?” Buffy asked him softly.

“Yeah,” he answered with a grin. “‘Bout covers it.”

Apparently this little tour through the concept of sexual consent had utterly blown Kenny’s mind. “Uh… Wh…” Nothing. Just faltering, and more silence.

Dawn broke it with a quiet, sweet request. “Kenny, can I please be normal me again? Then maybe we can, like, hug and say we’re sorry and say goodbye and, you know, try to end on a decent note?”

“It sounds so… grown up.”

“Yeah,” Dawn answered. “It really kind of does, doesn’t it.”

“Huh,” Kenny answered wonderingly.

***

Now that Dawn was right-sized again, it saved time. They got to just stay in town, for one thing, and Dawn… Well, Dawn did a lot of prancing around in relief and running up and down the streets in plain view of the rest of humanity in celebration of the fact that she no longer had to hide herself like she was some kind of huge, animated scarlet letter. 

She could also fit into her clothes again. And into showers. Since she was technically a student, if a lapsed one, they hung around the college long enough for her to do exactly that. She no longer had a working key-card to her dorm, but she slipped in when someone else opened the door… And you know what? She was in there for a long minute. Long enough that Buffy kind of wondered if she should go in and check to see if the girl was okay, till Spike, catching her alarm, shook his head a little. “Remember how long we spent in the shower after we got out of Hell-A?”

/Good point. But./ “Okay, but that was also because sex. Which I’m kind of hoping isn’t what’s happening in there, because strangers…”

That earned her a grunt. “Just give her time to luxuriate, Buffy. If she’s not back in another quarter-hour, maybe we can worry.”

Dawn did emerge, finally, looking flushed and almost orgasmic, damp, fluffy-haired, and fresh in a light-blue sundress and flats, and just seriously pleased with her standard-sized existence. “Oh. My. _God,_ that was amazing,” she told them, practically squealing. “That was legit, hands down, the absolute _best_ shower I will _ever_ have in my _entire_ life.”

Well, might as well keep with the celebratory theme, right? Buffy brandished the credit card they’d been using all the way across country, courtesy of Vi. “So. Now we can all fit… Dinner?” She pulled out her phone and glanced at the time. “It’s eleven now, so probably the only thing open is, like, Denny’s, but…”

“Buffy, this is a college town. Everything here is open till at least midnight.”

“Oh. Right. I forgot.” And once again, Buffy found herself really missing college. “So, what do you…”

“Mexican. _God_ , I miss Mexican.”

/You know you’re from California when…/ “You and me both, Dawnie.” She shot Spike a glance. “You okay with that?”

He made a sour face. “Doubt they have an onion blossom, but I’ll find something I like. ‘F nothing else, maybe they’ll have a decent margherita…”

“We’ll go to Los Toros. It’s amazing, and it’s right across the street.” Dawn’s pronouncement was made through the sound of a watering mouth. “They have the most incredible _carnitas_ …”

“How’s their _arroz con pollo?”_ Buffy asked, her stomach cramping and her tongue desperately hopeful.

“Oh my God. Not too wet, not too dry, but just right…”

“It’s a sit-down place, I hope,” Spike muttered as they struck out. “These college towns are usually loaded with walk-up kiosks. Like gettin’ fish an’ chips or a curry back home, only they take longer.”

“See, that’s one thing I never understood about the UK,” Dawn pointed out as they walked. “The curry thing. I mean, every other food ever on the entire British Isles is so bland, but then everyone’s completely nuts for this uber-spicy Indian food. I mean, tikki masala is _insane_. I grew up eating Mexican, but that stuff is nuts. How do people who live on weird meat pies and porridges or whatever handle that stuff?”

“Maybe it’s because it’s _not_ bland,” Spike mused in answer. “Makes you mad for a bit of flavor. And anyway, it’s basically the same thing, yeah? Every country’s fast food is something they stole from someone else because they weren’t inventive enough to come up with it on their own.”

Dawn frowned thoughtfully. “Well, when you put it _that_ way…” She darted a glance at Spike. “Do _you_ like curry?”

Spike favored her with a smug look. “A’ course I do, Niblet. ‘S in the rulebook, yeah? They’d kick me out, I came back an’ didn’t have a curry.”

Buffy scoffed. “You weren’t even _in_ England when the stuff got popular.”

“Shows what you know. We had a…” He halted abruptly, shook his head. “Still got my pride, innit?” He tucked a hand inside his duster and casually produced his smokes and Zippo. “Any Londoner worth his salt who can’t handle the spice is a prat.”

/‘We had a’ what? God, did you have, like, a servant from India or something?/ She belatedly remembered him saying something about his father having been a soldier in that country, so she supposed it might have been possible. /Would they even have had food from India in England back then?/

But he still seemed really hung up on keeping quiet about that whole ‘upper middle-class’ thing in front of Dawn—like Dawn would give a crap—so she might as well play along. Accordingly, Buffy leveled a steady gaze at him and allowed a tiny smile to tickle at the corners of her lips in instigation. “Or any Englishman in general?” she prodded lightly.

The aside earned her a _very_ warning glance. A ‘keep your bloody mouth shut around the children, you traitorous chit’ kind of look. And the claim shivered with brief cold. “As a general rule, yeah,” he agreed easily, and corked his mouth with the cigarette.

/Oh. My. God./ He would go down with the ship of his self-image if it killed him. It was even more adorable now that she knew why. And the fact that he thought she would ever remotely betray that confidence, tromp on his holy ground like that, was both amusing… and mildly offensive at this stage of the game. She hadn’t poked him where he was vulnerable in a very, very long time, after all. /You’re still an idiot. And you’re lucky I love you./

She hooked her arm in his, because it would tell him that he was safe from exposure. Caught his startled glance, and felt him relax all through their link. “Maybe there’s somewhere that does an onion blossom around here, and we can get you one before we leave town.”

“Wow,” Dawn quipped from the other side of Spike, and flanked him to link up with his other arm. “Change of subject much?”

Spike was staring at Dawn in clear shock at being so bracketed by Summers women. “Could, ah, do that, I suppose…”

“Any steakhouses around here, Dawn?”

Dawn threw her a suspicious look around Spike’s chin. “Maybe? I dunno, steakhouses are not really a college thing, but I know there’s a grip of bars that might sell those stupid things.”

“Brilliant.”

They rounded the corner to come face-to-face with a creamy-pinkish-orange, stucco edifice bearing a familiar sort of white-green-and-red-lettered sign arcing above the door. ‘Bienvenidos!’ it proclaimed. ‘Los Toros Mexican Restaurant y Cantina!’

“Now _that_ ,” Buffy informed them all, and felt relaxation spread through her at the scents wafting through the air, “looks like home.”

***

The plan for the morning was for Spike to hang out in the RV hiding from the sun while Buffy and Dawn ducked into the Dean of Students’ office back at the school to check in with him about her place in fall semester. However… that whole idea kind of got the kibosh when Dawn literally begged to go to the beach first. “We can talk to the dean after. Please? I just really, really want to get out in the sun first, with no one watching me and judging me, and, just, _please?”_

“Dawn, we’re already here. It’ll take, like, ten minutes.”

_“Please._ I just… Buffy, I really need to talk to you. Away from here. I need to clear my head. Can we just go and, you know, get breakfast and walk on the beach and… just _talk?”_

She _had_ been through hell, was maybe having some kind of massive personality issue or identity thing or something. Who knew. Anyway, she looked so anxious that in spite of herself, Buffy caved. And Spike, who would deny his ‘Niblet’ literally nothing, didn’t even razz her for it. He just put the RV in gear and nodded at the road. “Where to?”

Where to turned out to be Point Isabel, which was apparently the best public beach hangout near the city, per Dawn. It also turned out to be pretty far outside the northern end of town, which led Buffy to ask her sister at one point just exactly how much of this Summer Session of hers she had actually spent, you know, at school. “Be serious, Buffy. Like you didn’t spend like half of your high school career at the beach.”

“Okay, but…” Buffy trailed off at that, seeking for a witty comeback.

“Assume she has you there, pet.”

“Oh, shut up. You’re not even involved in this debate, Mr. Didn’t Even Know Me Back Then!”

Spike grinned at that. “Saw how tanned you were the first couple years I fought you. Didn’t spend nearly as much time proddin’ gravestones in the dark back then, Slayer…”

“You,” Buffy informed him flatly, “are _supposed_ to be on _my_ side.”

“Oh yeah? Am I in trouble?” He appeared to be facing that prospect with enormous glee.

Ugh. “You’re impossible.” 

Dawn eyed them, one to the other, with arms crossed, and then pronounced with significant disgust, “You two are just _so_ gross.”

/Excellent./ “Sorry, Dawn. Them’s the breaks.”

“Whatever. Here. Turn here. This place is great. It’s like the only public spot in the entire San Francisco area that has an actual beach. Everything else is just, you know, rocks and that weird grass. Marsh grass or whatever.” She frowned fitfully, the inherent disdain of the SoCal girl flooding her features. “What is it with the coastline up here being all… not beach-y?”

“Different environment, Platelet,” Spike intoned, and cut the wheel over. They pulled out to the long drive to the ‘Regional Shoreline’… which to be fair, wasn’t trying to identify itself as a ‘beach’, per se. It was a good time of day for them to come to a place like this, though, considering the sun was at their backs and Spike would be safe to be outside with them, as long as he stayed in the shade of the RV. 

“Keep going,” Dawn chanted as they pulled into the long drive that led to the park. “Keep going… Not there yet. This is all rocks. Past there. That’s just a breakwater. That’s a dog park. Keep going… Over that bridge. Keep going…”

“Is there really a beach here, or are you just screwing with us?” Buffy was starting to believe that sand was mythical at this place. 

“I swear. It’s just, there’s only a really small one, and you have to know where to look. Keep going… Here! Pull over here!”

Spike came to a halt on what was basically an extremely narrow two-lane stretch of gray-top and narrowed his eyes at her. “Bit, there’s nowhere to pull over with this beast. I’ve got salt marsh on my right and scrub on my left and the ocean after that…”

“Just over there. Off the road. Everyone does it. You won’t get a ticket. We won’t be here long enough. I swear.”

Grumbling, Spike pulled the RV off onto the shoulder. It even mostly fit off-road. “If we get stuck, Niblet, you’re pushing us out.”

She grinned irrepressibly at him. “I’m not a giant anymore. You two are the strong ones. But I’ll help. C’mon!” And she piled out of the RV like it was going out of style.

With a put-upon sigh, Spike threw the monster into park and nodded at Buffy. “Go on, pet. I’ll watch.”

Buffy passed him on the way to the door and caught his mouth in a long, wistful kiss. “I wish you could come too.”

He let out a little huff of air when she pulled back. “Maybe we’ll find another bloody Gem of Amara someday, yeah?”

The likelihood of that was pretty slim and they both knew it. And, dammit… now she kind of really regretted giving the thing to Angel. Wasn’t it just like him to smash the stupid thing in a fit of self-sacrifice? 

She really missed spending days with her vampire. Even orange-y ones that looked like eternal sunsets. Though, when you really got down to it, meeting in the sunset was basically just kind of them all over. 

Heading down the steps, she followed Dawn down to the sheltered little cove in the sculpted coastline created by man. The long arm of the artificial breakwater, built at right-angles to the surf, had caused the waters to deposit silt all along the inside if the angle, like an elbow collecting a bunch of lint; hence the presence of what might, in this part of the state, pass for a ‘beach’. It smelled different than a beach down south, of course; less ‘sunscreen-petroleum-kelp’ and more ‘seashell-wet rock-vague-hint-of-diesel’… but when she took her shoes off and walked there, the feel of sand under her feet was close enough to the same, and that was all that mattered. Coarser and not as hot, more damp and a little gritty and filled with knobby bits of shell and squishy bobs of rotten driftwood scattered through it, maybe the occasional bottle cap, and hopefully she wasn’t going to step on broken glass, but if it wasn’t SoCal talcum-powder-level beach sand, it was still a beach, and it worked for her.

She hadn’t been on a beach, barring the one in Hell-A, since Rome, and that had been…

She looked back toward the RV, her gaze drifting irrevocably back to the man who was here now. He stood like a figure carven in black, leaning nonchalantly against the metal wall with a cigarette in one hand, flicking the Zippo absently open and shut while he watched them. God, she loved him. She just… really, _really_ loved him. Watching him made her wish she could… do something. Write, like he did, whether he thought he could do it well or not. Paint. _Something_. 

Dawn looked back from where she was running around on the wetter part of the beach, a disturbed flock of scavenging gulls squawking in protest overhead. She slowed, turned, came back to stand by Buffy and follow her gaze. “They had us read Byron in one of my Summer Session classes,” she murmured after a moment. “He kind of looks like something from that, doesn’t he?”

Buffy choked. Fought back a quick sputter, covering her mouth. “Please, Dawn, if you value your life, don’t ever say that to his face.”

Dawn looked kind of hurt. “Why? He’s all… you know, anti-hero-heroic, and in the black clothes and kind of, standing alone and…”

Buffy felt the little smile touch her lips. “He hates Byron.”

That earned her a blink. “Spike knows _poetry?”_

/Oh, man. Minefield./ “Um…” She bit her lip. 

“Huh.” Hazel eyes turned thoughtful, then incisive. “Well, I mean, I guess that makes sense, since whenever he went to school was, you know, forever ago. They were probably required to know stuff like that.”

“Yeah. Totally.” /Crisis averted./

“Wait, so…” Relief and excitement abounded suddenly in her sister’s voice as she revved up in typical Dawn Summers fashion. “Do you think he could help me with my homework if I took that class? ‘Cause that’s the thing with Summer Session; to give you a taste of what classes you might want to really dig into Freshman year, and I kind of really liked the Literature and Poetry one; and I know you took it too, but you never got to finish it, and…”

Buffy bit the inside of her cheek, hard. “You’d, ah, have to ask him, Dawnie.” /He probably would, since he’ll basically deny you nothing, but that would be totally outing himself to you as a closet poetry geek, and I am just so not going to do it for him. Not for any money./ 

Dawn slowed down, looked a little glum. “I didn’t sign up for it, since I didn’t think I could handle it by myself, but it did seem… fun. Challenging. But kind of over my head, too.” She shrugged. “But he probably won’t, since he said school is for turning people into mindless automatons…”

“He _what?”_ /When was _this?_ /

As if realizing she had stepped in something there, Dawn hurried to qualify her—or, really, Spike’s—words. “Well, he told me I should go anyway because it’s what you’d want, and it would totally make me a productive member of society?” 

The hopeful expression was too much. /Oh, Spike./

She deflated again. “Anyway, if you guys are moving wherever, he won’t be around to help me either way, so…”

/Oh, jeez with the pity-party./ “We _have_ phones, Dawn. And we don’t even know where we’re going yet.” 

“Yeah.” They walked along the beach a little in silent tandem, Buffy with her arms crossed, Dawn with hers swinging, each of them holding their shoes and with their barefoot strides making toe-y little divots in the coarse sand. Buffy could feel Spike’s eyes on her nape, his patient yearning in her blood. She would kiss him a lot when they got back, since it was all she could do. 

As if aware of what Buffy was feeling, Dawn’s eyes flickered over to Buffy’s neck. “So, um… can I ask you something?”

Dawn was usually only this tentative when she was about to ask for either a really big favor, or if she was going to delve into some seriously touchy ground. Thus, Buffy braced herself. “Okay?”

The deep breath was audible. “Um… what’s it like? To let him, you know… bite you?”

/Oh. Wow./ It crashed in on her; a heavy weight. She hadn’t expected the question, though why she hadn’t was beyond her. They hadn’t done it in front of Dawn, obviously, but it wasn’t like they were hiding it either. Away from Slayer Central, Buffy was wearing a lot of casual, low-collar shirts like she had done in Hell-A, enjoying the summer weather and the wafting of cooling breezes up her neck. 

Once upon a time, when she had first been sleeping with Spike, she had worn goddamn turtlenecks after each assignation, and they hadn’t even been doing this then. Back then it had been merely to hide the evidence of his desperate desire to bite her, spelled out in huge trains of hickeys up and down the column of throat and neck and shoulders; and god, how had she never recognized the enormous self-restraint he had been employing back then? 

Now, though, she just honestly didn’t give a damn. Not to mention that neither of them had exactly been shy about discussing the matter in front of her sister. But. Well. Somehow Buffy just had never really thought it would come up. Which was, she realized now, super stupidly naïve of her, because of _course_ Dawn was going to be curious. Even kind of shocked, probably, since she would be going off of past!Buffy behavior. But, well… Okay. Head off some misconceptions, maybe, or… 

From behind them she could feel Spike’s response to her brief surge of alarm, did her best to calm herself so he’d know it wasn’t anything dire. Too bad the claim wasn’t a two-way radio kind of thing, or she could vibe him some sort of reassurance. Or, you know, send a request for backup. Because, /God, Spike, now I really wish you could be down here to join the conversation./ It wasn’t, after all, one in which she should be speaking for him about everything. /Just tell your own side, then, and the parts you know to be true, and if Dawn needs to ask him anything, that’s on them./ “Um, okay. Well. First off… he’s never done it without permission…”

Dawn rolled her eyes as if Buffy had said something incredibly dumb. “Buffy, Spike wouldn’t even _touch_ you without permission anymore. He’s scared to death of ever hurting you again.”

Buffy jerked back like she’d been burned. “Wh…”

“I’m young. I’m not stupid.” 

That withering tone was almost too much. “Okay, I’m just gonna walk right past that.” Buffy cleared her throat. “Alright. So… Um…”

Dawn seemed kind of amused by her descent into semi-stutters. “You didn’t think I’d notice or something?”

/Damn./ “No, I…” Buffy struggled for equanimity. “It’s just… kind of private.” She needed to sit down. Suiting action to thought, she moved to plant her butt on a nearby stretch of flotsam-free sand, somewhere not entirely damp, and shrugged. “Okay,” she went on as Dawn plopped down beside her. “Uh, the thing is… I’m not food, alright?”

Dawn lifted her eyebrows challengingly. “How does _that_ work? I mean, he is… _eating_ you, right?”

Buffy bit her lip to contain the hysterical urge to giggle. After she got herself under control, did a few breathing exercises through her nose, she managed to hug her knees and nod calmly enough. “Okay, yeah, but that’s kind of… a side-benefit. This is more of a… bonding thing. A…” God, how to explain it? “He’s… a different species from me, Dawn. And that part of him needs to know that I’m okay, and that we’re committed. That we’re not going anywhere. And yeah, in Hell-A it helped a lot, since there weren’t hospitals or anything for him to get food, and also if we ever got separated, we could feel each other, know if one of us was in trouble or hurt, find each other if we got lost, that kind of…”

“Wait. You can feel each other like that because he _bites_ you?”

/Oh./ “Yeah, because I guess he’s got... I dunno; my life-force in him or something. He can connect with my cells as long as we keep it… up to date. And I can feel him as long as I…” Okay, maybe steer around that for a while, that she had enough demon in her to do the same? Or, full disclosure? “It kind of works both ways.”

Dawn jumped slightly, then leaned back to stare at her in amazement. Buffy not-quite avoided her eyes for a second, fighting for equanimity as her thoughts drifted unerringly to the new mark on Spike’s neck. The one she hoped would stay this time. The one she had made when she had gone primitive!Buffy and kind of ravaged him a little (not that he seemed to mind all that much). It was healing, yes, but slowly, and every time she touched him there he trembled like she was giving him a handjob, spurts of desperate, fiery lust racing through the link between them to completely derail anything and everything he might be doing, thinking, seeing at the moment. Which was just really, really nice, made her feel incredibly powerful. And could be extremely dangerous, depending on the moment. It was a power she had to use wisely, and not, for instance, while he was driving seventy miles an hour down a freeway. 

They had learned their lesson on that one somewhere around about, what? Middle of nowhere Wyoming, when Dawn was passed out in the RV and Buffy had had to use her Slayer-reflexes and a lot of serious strength to help Spike steer them back to not-death, because her playful exploration of the new-ish bite had nearly cost them a wrecked motorhome.

Sex in the Rocky Mountains, by the way, was fragrant and piney and wild.

End tangent. “So… you that know I’m… That Slayers are…” God, how to navigate this. “Remember the shadow-play thing?”

Dawn shuddered, her gaze turning briefly inward. “How can I forget?”

The merciless smile touched Buffy’s lips in spite of herself. “Yeah, I guess it was kind of memorable,” she answered grimly. “Anyway, the thing is… that ‘infused with demon-ness’ thing? That’s kind of why I’m retiring from the Slayer Organization. Because I made them question themselves.”

Dawn frowned at that. “Because you and Spike…”

Buffy sighed heavily. “It’s more than that. I’m not like the other Slayers, Dawn. I’ve died a bunch of times, and the part of me that got all mixy with demon-y stuff is stronger than theirs. Sometimes it’s even stronger than my human side, depending on what’s happening for me that day.” /Like, you know, when I come back from the dead and I’m hella confused, or if I see my mate threatened, and I turn into feral!Buffy./ “I’m… kind of as much of a hybrid as a vampire; and since we think it was a vampire-type demon they used to make the Slayers…”

Dawn gasped, a look of sudden recognition lighting her eyes.

“Yeah. You know; use the thing that hunts you against itself. That kind of thing. But it had a side-effect. I’m kind of… attracted to the thing I’m supposed to hunt, since we’re kind of the same species in a way. Or opposites, but still… related, or something. Probably their way to make it so we could find ‘em, track ‘em, all of that stuff; but because of that, sharing blood makes me and him… super close. And there’s a side of me that can get just as… primal as he gets when it comes to… needing to claim a mate. So…” She shrugged. “I tried to lie to myself for years, but I’m done with that.” She shot her sister a level look, waiting. “I am what I am, Dawn. And all the things that used to freak me out? I think it was just because I was scared to admit they might make me happy. So…” /Why the hell didn’t we tell her this before we took off?/ It seemed kind of unfair, in retrospect, to have put it all on Dawn and the whole de-gianting thing, when it had been so much more. “That’s why I left. I’m done justifying myself to people who can’t hang, or trying to walk both sides of the road.”

Dawn was very quiet for a long moment, digesting, then, “I guess… you were always like this, though. Like, you haven’t really changed, right? You’re the sister I always had. You’re just… kind of out to yourself? Like when Willow realized who she loved when she met Tara, and had to deal?”

/When you get right down to it./ “Yeah. Something like that.”

Dawn nodded and looked down. “You were pretty messed up over it for a long time.”

“Yeah.” /Especially considering it’s been about a lot more than who I’m attracted to. Having to come to terms with the fact that you’re not all human is… kind of a thing./

Young but extremely wise eyes rose to meet hers, caught them earnestly; and it was almost like Dawn could read her mind when she next spoke. “I love you. You know that, right Buffy?”

It helped to hear it. “I know. Thank you, Dawn.

“And I love Spike. Like, you know how crazy happy I am that you two figured it out and that you’re together, right? And that you’re happy?”

“I know.” Impulsively, Buffy hugged on her sister. “You always did. I guess… you always wanted this, huh?”

Dawn nodded over her shoulder. But they pulled apart, Dawn picked at a shell before her crossed knees and spent a little too much time inspecting it, looking once more uncertain. “So this… thing. The whole ‘sharing blood’ thing. It’s like… serious, right?”

/Okay, now what?/ “Very.”

“Like… No take-backsies?”

/Oh, I get it./ Buffy felt her lips twitch at the phrasing. “No take-backsies. Not that I would. For one thing, I don’t feel Angel anymore, thank God. I never realized that was the problem with letting him go till Spike explained it…”

“Oh!” Dawn exclaimed, head jerking up. “Because when you let him… Because of the thing with Faith and when she shot him, and…”

“Yeah.” 

“So it was the same for you and him for, like, years, but you, what? Didn’t realize it or something?”

Buffy felt her lips twitch in irritation. “He knew, but he never told me that was why I couldn’t get over him.”

Dawn absorbed that for a long moment, then, “Wow.” She sounded, if anything, somewhat offended on Buffy’s behalf.

“Yeah. Though, dying a couple of times kind of diluted the bond there enough for me and Spike to finally figure things out, eventually. And luckily having a mutual claim also makes it so Spike doesn’t have to feel Angel or Drusilla anymore. Because that’s the thing with vamps and bloodlines.” Buffy felt her mind drift back in time a little. “You should have seen them in Hell-A. It’s weird; it’s like, if a vamp is younger than any other one in the same bloodline, the older one can totally push them around or whatever. It’s so rude. It didn’t even matter that Angel was human there; Spike was so imprinted that he just…” She waved her hand, inarticulate with memory. “He kind of broke Drusilla’s hold over him a little when he tried to kill her for me, but he could really only do that because she was weakened by fire and she’s kind of nuts. But especially now that he’s a vamp again, Angel could always make Spike do whatever if he really tried.” She frowned thoughtfully. “Now, though, he doesn’t have to obey, at least theoretically, which is awesome…”

Dawn frowned. “There’s a lot of weird politics in this, huh?”

Buffy sighed heavily. “You so have no idea. _I_ had no idea till I got involved.” She picked up a broken shell of her own and tossed it from hand to hand. “He really needed this; just as much as I did.” /Even if, in a way, he’s only kind of traded up to me, because apparently the way vamps work is, someone’s always gotta be on top in the hierarchy, and how weird is it that yours truly is always the buck-stopper of all time?/ Not that she would ever feel wholly right if it _wasn’t_ her, after all the times she had been absolutely helpless in her life, between the asylum and the Cruciamentum and being thralled and chained up however many times. But… it also came with a lot of responsibility. Luckily, Spike trusted her with it, in the same way she had been able to trust him with it when he had technically been ‘on top’ for all the preceding months, in Hell-A and shortly thereafter; and for the same reasons. 

Dawn gave a pensive nod. “You weren’t kidding around when you went back to get him, were you?” she asked softly. “Like, it wasn’t just a ‘we’ll see how this goes’ kind of thing, was it?”

Buffy met her sister’s eyes candidly. “No. It was for keeps. It was for keeps before he put the amulet on. He just didn’t believe me. He had reasons for that, which was why I was so glad I had a second chance to convince him. And I asked him to bite me the first day we were back together, so no. It was totally not like, ‘We’re stuck in this hellscape and I need to feed you’ and it became more later. I knew exactly what I was doing.”

Another silence ensued, then those young hazel eyes met hers, firm and sharp. “The thing is, you _know_ it’s for keeps, and _he_ knows it’s for keeps. You have this… blood thing. Which is, I guess, kind of like you’re practically married or something…”

Buffy jerked a little, surprised at the summary, but when you got down to it, she supposed Dawn had a point. Their demons certainly were, and since there wasn’t exactly a huge demarcation between sides of self, it wasn’t like they could divorce those parts away and be like, ‘Um, only one part of us is permanently committed’. /Kind of a primitive wedding, with all the screwing and biting and bloodplay, but, you know. Demons. At least there were no larva involved./ “Dawn, what are you getting at?”

_“I_ don’t.” 

The flat pronouncement, made with naked fear written all over her sister’s face, took her utterly aback. “What?”

“I _don’t_. Know that it’s for keeps. That I get to _keep_ you guys. Together. That I get to keep Spike. That I get to keep _you_ , being this happy. That this isn’t just some kind of dream, or something that isn’t just going to blow up in your faces, or fall apart, or something.”

/What?/

Dawn watched her patiently, looking suddenly about five years older than she really was. Like _she_ was the older sibling or the parent and Buffy was the one getting schooled. “I mean, think about it, Buffy. What I’m seeing now is completely _bizarre_ for me. You two spend _years_ fighting. You have this affair no one knew about, but what I _did_ see was you both being completely miserable about it… and then what _happened_ happened; and I don’t even want to know, really, because you say you two have that figured out, and honestly I just wish I never even knew about it, because I just don’t even understand half of what you two have going on half the time…”

/Oh God; of _course_ you don’t, Dawn. _No_ one does, because it was…/ It hit Buffy then, for the first time really. /Because it was a demon thing; not a human thing at all. And once _I_ understood that, stopped thinking like a human, it all made so much more sense, and I could really kill Xander sometimes for even involving you in it. I wish like hell you never knew about it, too./ 

“…And even with that, you still wanted me to hang with him, still trusted him, kept acting like you were just _waiting_ for him, every day; like it was making you nuts that he was gone. Going by his crypt all the time, asking Clem if he’d heard anything. And then he comes back and you two are just tight as heck again; like nothing happened and he was the only one you could trust in the entire universe, and it’s like, _what?”_

/Oh, man, when you put it _that_ way…/

“And then it’s like, oh. All of us have to realize that some stuff went down between you two, all totally behind the scenes, that _no one_ understood, but you were so closed off that it was, like, completely impossible to know what you were feeling about _anyone_ , because you had a duty and a war to fight, and he was like your… battle-husband or something, out of nowhere…”

/Okay, true, but the thing is, Dawn, he was my left-hand guy for years, and I just never admitted it…/

“And it was like randomly all the sudden you could read each other’s minds or whatever…”

“That wasn’t new, actually.”

Dawn ignored her. “…And if anyone even looked cross-eyed at him you were gonna rip their heads off. You stopped talking to Giles, you stopped talking to Principal Wood…”

/Okay, but…/

“…You never figured things out with Willow really, Xander had to watch his step completely because it didn’t matter, what happened; none of it. Spike was this complete no-fly zone. And then he died, and you just… fell apart.”

Buffy pulled in a hard breath, because this recitation, from Dawn’s perspective, really was a one-two punch, and really showed her just how much of a basket-case she’d been for… Well, basically, since Glory. And, more than that; how, from the outside, things with Spike had probably just seemed utterly mystifying to everyone who hadn’t been _them_.

“And now you’re just _so_ together, and you _never_ fight, and even when you do it’s like you two basically just have one of those weird eye-conversations, laugh a little, mention having a workout somewhere, and it’s over; and it’s _bizarre_.” Dawn drew breath to skewer her sister with an agonized gaze. “I keep waiting for it to get real. I keep waiting for it to fall apart…”

“Oh, Dawnie…” Of _course_ she expected them to fall apart. All she was trained to expect from her sister and Spike was some kind of eventual, spectacular unraveling. This all had to feel like the breathless hush before the end of the world, and god, Buffy knew those feels. The calm before the storm, the ‘this is too good, something terrible is about to happen’ feeling. The ‘I’m happy so obviously someone’s about to die or there’s going to be an apocalypse’ feeling, and jeez, hellmouth living had really screwed them up.

Dawn’s voice was shaking now. “I lost _everyone_ , Buffy. Dad left, then I lost Mom. Then I lost you, and Tara, and sat by her body for _hours;_ and then I lost Giles and Anya and Spike, and basically never got you or Xander back from that. And now it’s like getting Spike back is also getting _you_ back, finally, in a way I _never_ thought I’d get you back, _ever_ …”

/Okay, ouch./ Painful to know the oft-abandoned kid sister you’d raised had basically resigned herself to living with a ghost. /And I know from abandonment issues. Crap./

“…And…” Dawn bit her lip, tears threatening. “Buffy, I just really, really need to know it’s real before I have to leave my family and go to school. I’m not asking you because I’m trying to get out of it or anything. Seriously. I’m just saying… please. Don’t kick me out when I just got my family back. It’s not even real yet. I just need to know… you’re both really _back_ and that it’s real before I go try to figure out my life on my own, or I’ll disintegrate or something, okay? _Please?”_

Buffy’s heart broke. It was the ‘don’t kick me out’ that did it. Because she herself had been kicked out. Somewhat younger, of course, but not all that much younger, and Dawn… Hell, Dawn had been through enough. “Oh God; Dawn, is that what you feel like? That we’re trying to kick you out? Get rid of you or something? Because that’s not what…”

“I know you want your time alone. And I promise. I’ll stop complaining about it. I’m just teasing anyway. I’m _so_ glad you’re happy. Seriously. I just…”

/Oh man./ “Listen, Dawn. That’s not even what this…” Resetting herself, Buffy caught her sister’s flapping, anxious hand. “I seriously just don’t want you to miss your chance at school. That’s the _only_ thing I was worried about. I meant that, and that’s just because I missed my chance; exactly like I said. It has nothing to do with not wanting you around or anything like that. And I’m pretty sure Spike doesn’t care one way or the other when you do the school thing…” She cast a tolerantly amused eye up toward the spot where her vampire leaned so much less casually against their ride, smoking and watching them with narrowed eyes. He was clearly concerned about whatever was causing Buffy to shoot all the anxious vibes around. “Since apparently he thinks it’ll just turn you into a mindless robot…”

“Oh my God, please don’t get mad about that; that was so just Spike being Spike, and it was like a _million_ years ago, while you weren’t even alive, it just slipped out…”

Buffy smiled a little, rueful and accepting. “Calm down, Dawn. I know all about Spike being Spike. Don’t worry.” Making a face, she finger-combed her hair impatiently back. Reset it in the hair-band, since Spike had gotten the thing loose on her earlier and it wasn’t doing its job right at all right now. It was breezy out here and wisps of shorter hair were trying to get in her eyes. “We should go talk to him before he starts to worry too much, since he can tell just from what I’m feeling that we’re talking about something relatively dire…”

“Wow, seriously?”

“Yeah.” Buffy pushed herself to her feet, dusted clinging sand off her butt. Which had, by the way, gotten damp despite her choice seating arrangements. Argh. “I’m sure he’ll be fine with it, since he’d probably be okay with it if you murdered somebody, much less wanted to take time off school, and then it’ll be down to talking with the dean.” She caught her sister’s eye firmly. “I don’t want you to lose your spot or your financial aid, okay, so even if we’re fine with you deferring for a semester, if they say you’re gonna get kicked out or lose your Pell Grant…”

Dawn threw up her hands. “I get it. But…” Her face softened into such huge amounts of gratitude that it almost overwhelmed Buffy. “Just, thank you. For listening. For _getting_ it.”

She had really thought Buffy was just going to force her to leave despite. Ignore everything she said and… 

Moving in close, Buffy wrapped her arms around her lanky, gangling sister, dangling there on the verge of girl and woman. Held her tight. Such a tough age, and Buffy… Buffy knew better than anyone how important it was to have someone, or a few someones, there to hold you together while you made that insane transition. “I love you, Dawn. I want you to be happy, too, you know.”

Dawn shook a little in their embrace; the first one they’d been able to share in a long time, what with the gianting and all. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Her sister was right. They probably needed the time.

***  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
So, now that that's done, we can move on to stage the final of this wee journey.  
  
Don't mind me. I just have a thing about this little family... picking itself up out of the shattered remains of Sunnydale, dusting itself off, and making life work in its little cuddly cluster of love.


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this chapter is mostly porn. I think a few other things happen in here that are somewhat cute, and I enjoyed writing them, but right now I'm mostly focused on the fact that they had space to get horizontal again, for a change, near the end. Because I have a one-track mind, and I thought they ought to explore how that works now that there's an, um, hierarchy in place. hehe..

Unsurprisingly, Spike was amenable to keeping his ‘Niblet’ around for a while longer. “Got to be honest, Bit. The thought of leaving you alone out here and just toddling off with Buffy was like to give me the willies, thinkin’ of all the trouble you could get into by yourself.”

Dawn actually punched him in the arm at that, which right then and there gave Buffy a fascinating insight into their interactions that she had never gotten to see, between gianting changing their physical relationship and that whole last year between them being all stilted. The ease of it kind of blew her mind. 

It blew her mind even harder the way Spike reacted. He actually ducked his head, did a playful, “Ow, Niblet. Pull up! Bloody hell; you’re damn near as bad as big sis!” and rubbed his bicep like Dawn had actually managed to hurt him… which was, okay, super cute. Like he was trying to build up her ego or something. 

“Oh, c’mon, Spike; be real. And anyway, stop being a jerk. I haven’t gotten myself into huge trouble like that since…”

_“Excuse_ me?” One painted fingernail shot up. “Turned into a giant.” A second. “Parking with a fledgling, and don’t _even_ get me started on that...” 

“Spike, seriously, that was _forever_ ago…”

“No excuse for stupid. Three. The thing with the egg and tryin’ to turn Joyce into a revenant…”

He had a point there, and what about an egg?

“I thought we weren’t ever gonna talk about that in front of _you. Know. Who?”_ Dawn interrupted, talking through her teeth and darting hunted glances at Buffy from the corners of her eyes. 

/Okay, storytime?/ 

A fourth finger unfurled. “Motorcycle mayhem…”

“Okay, but you were there for all of those things except for the latest one, so…”

“Exactly my point. Which means…”

“That I can get in just as much trouble with you and Buffy around as on my own.” Dawn crossed her arms triumphantly and glared down her nose at him. 

Spike’s mouth closed on a return glare that was mostly stymied frustration, and wow. He was literally exactly her older brother. How had Buffy never seen it before now?

“So, Buffy,” Dawn went on, turning away from the thwarted vampire. “Ready to go talk to Dean Charles?”

“I guess now’s as good a time as any. You okay there, Spike?”

Big Bad waved an irritable hand in their direction, still stewing over having been bested by a teenager. “I’ll do.” 

“Alright. Be back soon.”

Dawn frowned, ducking her head out of the doorway. “Why can’t he come?” She glanced around them at the shady walkway. “There’re trees all the way to the side-door there, and we’re parked on the east side, right, so as long as we stay between the RV and the trees till we get under ‘em…”

Spike glanced out of the narrow gap in the front window. Craned skyward, assessing the light level. “You really want me there, Platelet?”

She didn’t exactly answer. She did look all Dawn-like and hopeful, though.

With a heavy, dramatic sigh, Spike stood up and went into the back of the RV to rustle around for a blanket. He could be heard muttering to himself about sudden breezes and moving leaves and big piles of dust and the things he did for Summers women, but Buffy knew for a fact that it was all for show. She didn’t even need the flutters of pleasure she felt on the blood-bond to read him. He was touched that Dawn wanted him to come along.

Twenty minutes later the secretary for the Associate Dean told them he had time to see them, and they showed themselves into the office of a balding, youngish, mixed-race Black guy wearing a tie that, no joke, had Looney-Tunes characters parading across it and—Buffy definitely recognized very small Sylvesters and Tweeties on one row—sitting behind a really kind of fun-looking desk. It, too had a few Looney-Tunes characters on it; Marvin the Martian holding the Abominable Snowman at swordpoint, Wile-E Coyote looming over the Roadrunner on what looked like some kind of spinney-thing… He had a definite thing for those guys. “So. Miss Summers. And, your older sister, is it?” 

“Yes,” Dawn, nodded as she shook the dean’s hand. “My sister’s name is Buffy, and this is…”

“William Pratt,” Spike cut in before Dawn could introduce him by his slightly more colorful name. “Family friend.” 

Neither of them missed the way Dawn’s head jerked over to Spike, mouth open, at this sudden exposé. They ignored her, though to focus on introductions.

Dean Charles released Buffy’s hand to shake Spike’s in turn while Buffy smiled internally, aware only belatedly that Spike had, sometime while they were sitting around waiting, removed and pocketed his rings and bracelets. He still had on one of his two necklaces; the longer one, if tucked neatly into his shirt. She had noticed, of course, that the duster was off. He’d left it behind in the outer office, folded neatly beneath the chair he’d occupied, wrapped around his protective blanket; a noble sacrifice, since she honestly couldn’t recall the last time he’d left the thing out of his sight since he’d regained it post-Hell-A. That damn coat was like his firstborn child.

Being as he didn’t happen to be wearing any eyeliner today and he was in one of his rare blue button-downs, he looked… Well. Barely Spike-like, unless you paid attention to the nails. And those were newly-painted, so they didn’t even really look all that punk. Given a day for him to artfully wear them down to ‘properly-punk-disheveled’ and they’d be a little more remarkable, but right now he just looked like he’d let one of them ‘have a go at him’ or something. /In costume, are we Spike?/

Her guy would literally do anything for Dawn. Lay down his life, yes, obviously. And, even worse… be tame. This was his Dawn-equivalent of when he’d tried (horribly, but with great dedication) to talk Buffy up to the social worker that one time. 

She hoped Dawn appreciated the effort. And she really hoped her bumbling lover kept his mouth shut for the better part of the interview. He had a tendency to say all the wrong things in such situation. 

Case in point. The Dean pulled his hand away thoughtfully, probably in unconscious registry of the room temperature thing, and lifted his brows. “You visiting from England, Mr. Pratt?”  
  
Spike winced at the use of his old surname and took his seat next to Buffy. “What? Oh, no. Been here for years.” It was obvious by the way his eyes darted over to Dawn’s that he was hoping the conversation would turn away from him and back to their charge, swiftly and with as little attention paid to him as possible. Less chance for something to go off the rails that way. 

Dean Charles, though, was busy trying to be polite to the ‘foreigner’. “Oh, really? You sound like a Londoner, though. I went there for my study abroad year, back in eighty-one. Had a blast. Never have managed to get back. Miss it.”

The attempt at bonding bonhomie had Spike a little on edge. “Oh, yeah?” he answered, something between wary and genial as he resettled himself. “Glad to hear it, mate. Jolly Old was goin’ through it ‘round then…”

“Yeah. New Wave everywhere. Everyone thought it wouldn’t go anywhere. The Punkers were irate…”

A wave of grr flowed through the bond. Buffy winced and nudged Dawn with her foot before the conversation could go to a sad, bad place.

Of course, Dawn took her encouragement totally the wrong way. “I love Punk,” she put in loyally. “I wish it was more of a thing now. What even is New Wave, anyway?”

Spike straightened in his chair, pride now rolling through the link like a tsunami. 

Dean Charles snorted with laughter. “I like you, Miss Summers. Most kids your age wouldn’t know either, so you get points for knowing one, at least. Alright, what can I do for you fine people?”

Dawn tensed and let out a breath. “Okay, so… I had to pull out of my Summer Session a few days early… And now I’m hoping to defer fall semester and start in spring semester instead…”

Dean Charles’ friendly expression turned immediately to a censorious one. “Now, that’s a bit of a problem. As a general rule, we tend not to grant deferments without serious extenuating circumstances. And even then, one has to file the paperwork request before the end of July…”

“I know, and semester starts in, like, a week. I’m so sorry. The thing is…” She glanced over at Buffy with a, ‘Help, I’m drowning!’ look.

“The thing is,” Buffy intercepted smoothly, “Dean Charles, we’re from Sunnydale. You heard about what happened down there?”

The dean’s expression smoothed instantly to deep concern. “Oh God, yes. That was absolutely tragic. I hear there was some kind of massive sinkhole incident there that swallowed the entire town, and the evacuation only managed to get some of the people out before…” He trailed off at their grim expressions. 

“Dawn’s had a bad couple of years, Mr. Charles. Our mother passed away just two years before the collapse, and then I was… hurt trying to help Dawn get out of a bad situation, and ended up in a coma for a while.” /Or something./ It was as good an explanation as any. “William here and another friend of ours, Tara, were helping to raise Dawn while I was… incapacitated. A little while after I… woke up, Tara was killed in… a drive-by…”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah. No one realized it. I was shot too, and they were all at the hospital with me. Dawn stayed with Tara for the whole night before they found them. And then the collapse. We, um, lost track of William afterward, for a whole year. He thought we died, we thought he did. We just all found each other again, which was why...”

“You left in the middle of Summer Session?” Dean Charles extrapolated, and his eyes were liquid with sudden understanding as he regarded Dawn.

“Yeah. I, um… I was acting out a lot, here. And then…”

Spike reached out, ruffled her hair. “We have lot of catching up to do. The Bit here knows that if she can’t get her schooling deferred, she’s gonna go on with it. Buffy won’t have her losin’ her chance, yeah? But we’re all a bit concerned she mightn’t do as well, innit, with all that? So if there’s a chance we can maybe have her take a bit of time off, maybe we can take a minute to breathe; get her head on straight. Get reacquainted. I don’t mind sayin’ it’s been the hell of a year or two.”

The dean sat back in his seat, steepling his fingers together. “I have to say, normally just hearing the last part would be enough to give me pause. Coming from what happened down in Sunnydale… From what I understand, a number of families are still trying to locate missing relatives after that disaster. But on top of that…” He shook his head in a sort of awe. “I’d heard that town had a strangely high crime rate, but it just sounds remarkable that one family could have gone through so much trauma.” 

He didn’t exactly sound suspicious, but it did beg the question. And since Buffy’s part of the story did have the one hole in it… “We probably should have moved away a long time ago,” she admitted quietly. “Especially after Mom died. But I was just a college kid myself, trying to raise a younger sister, and that was the town I knew. I got into enough trouble of my own before then…” The more details she gave that were accurate, the better it would look in case the guy tried to follow up. “…I was just starting to get life figured out when all the sudden everything changed. So I quit school, got a job, and…” She spread her hands. “You know. You stay with what you know, try to make the best of it. It never occurred to me to try to move us anywhere else.”

The dean nodded sadly. “Yeah, that I do understand.” His expression grew troubled, and he leaned forward. “Well.” Cleared his throat. “Normally I would have to dismiss the request out of hand, but considering that your former home is a matter of record…” He turned to the side a little to tap a few keys of his computer. Peered at the screen. And frowned. “The financial aid package you were awarded, Miss Summers, does not specify when in the academic year you must use the monies, so you’re good there. It only states that you must complete your degree in four years total. You officially began dispersing those monies in Summer Session, so technically you did so at the appropriate time to convince the Federal Government and all other donating parties that your schooling is proceeding on schedule. Should you defer fall semester, that time will not be counted against your use, and you will have another semester tacked onto the end of your four years in which to use those monies. However,” and here he turned away from the screen to pin Dawn with a fierce sort of look. “You will not be able to enroll in any courses offered in the spring semester which began in the fall. Your available courses, therefore, will perforce be cut in half.”

Dawn nodded acceptance. “Yeah. I mean, I know.” She shrugged philosophically and shot Buffy a sad little look. “I guess that means I’ll have to wait till next year for that Poetry and Literature one…”

“Now, hold up, Bit,” Spike interjected, abruptly concerned. “You were planning to take a poetry course?” 

Buffy concealed a smile behind her hand. 

“Yeah, but it’s a two-semester deal. Literature in the first semester and then poetry in the sec…”

“So now you won’t be able to?” Stern outrage began to seep into the rumbling voice.

/This is just too good./ Dawn had literally zero clue what she had just stepped into.

“Well, it sounds like if you don’t take the first semester you can’t…”

“Bugger that!”

Buffy was going to suffocate if she had to hold back laughing for any longer. Dawn looked completely bewildered, the Dean was staring at them all like he had lost the script for a very complex and startling play, and this was just too hilarious.

“Spike, seriously, what’s…”

“You don’t do this class, and I bloody well will teach it to you myself, you hear me, Bit?”

“You… What?”

Spike rounded on Buffy, so fast she didn’t have time to realize the tables had turned. “You _knew_ about this?”

/God, I love you./ “Careful, William. You’ve just totally outed yourself to the masses.”

Breathing through his nose, Spike stilled. And he did so with such comical suddenness that Buffy could swear she was watching a cartoon as his head swiveled to face Dawn, now watching him with shocked amazement. “Oh, bloody hell,” he groaned, and deflated.

This was possibly going to go down in history as her favorite day ever. Reaching out, Buffy lightly patted his sagging shoulder. “It’s okay, Sweetie. The children all find out sometime.”

The horror spreading through the blood-bond was possibly worse than if he had come home to find her in bed with a chaos demon. Maybe. Or at least it had to be a close second.

***

Buffy called Vi after that to give her an update. Vi told them to sell the RV, since it would cost too much to ship it back to New York, and no one knew what the heck the Manhattan cell would do with it anyway. ‘I mean… I guess use the money to go wherever you need to, and if there’s anything left we can use it to pay off some of the gas bill on the card, huh?’

Maybe the girl still felt a little guilty about how things had gone down back at Revello. She had been one of the quiet ones during the mutiny, but she seemed to feel bad for silently going along. And anyway, she had a point. So they cleaned up the motorhome and hocked it to some used-RV dealer down on the southern end of San Jose, then used the proceeds to plan their next steps. 

They could have just taken a cab, no doubt, to continue their undecided journey, but Spike clearly had an agenda in mind. They took a cab a few streets over… to an Enterprise lot. “Spike,” Buffy pointed out anxiously as the cabby pulled up, “you do know that I’m under the age where they’ll let me rent a car. And my license is still valid, but practically the only time I drove anywhere in the last few years, not counting down to Oxnard to meet Angel that time, was to crash into someone with Mom’s Jeep…”

Spike set down his suitcase, reached into his duster, and pulled a worn, black leather wallet out of one of the inside pockets. And, to her amazement, wordlessly flashed a California driver’s license at her. 

“Wait, what?” Dumbfounded, she dropped her duffel and stretched out a hand to snatch at it. “You’re not even… I mean, you have to have, like, a legal identity to get… Who even…”

He tugged it away from her grasping hands and gave her a level, scolding glance. “Buffy, be serious. As if I’m not gonna have one in case someone asks when I’m tryin’ to get a beer or summat…”

She frowned, still trying to get a look at the name on the thing. “I just figured if anyone gave you any trouble you’d smash and grab. Lemme look. What’s it say?” She was burning with curiosity.

“Is it good enough to fool the cops?” Dawn interrupted, moving on to more important things. “‘Cause that’s what the rental guys’ll wanna know. They’ll look you up in the system. If the DMV doesn’t have a record of you it’ll be no such luck, buddy, fake ID or no.”

Spike rolled his tongue behind his teeth and tapped the ID lightly against his palm. “I’m good to go, courtesy of Wolfram and bloody Hart before the bastards went sayonara. The DMV thinks we go way back, actually.”

Buffy was totally nonplussed at that. “What, you mean you have, like, a fake birth certificate somewhere, and what? A social security number and a credit history?” Spike smirked and moved to shove the card back into his wallet. “No, wait!”

He paused, eyeing her with a jaundiced air. “I’m not gonna show it to you, Buffy.”

She was so not going to beg. But she let her eyes do the pleading for her, and really, what was the big? It was going to be some stupid fake name anyway, right? Something they’d come up with for him down there at that insane, inside-out hellscape of a lawyerville, so why should he care if she…

With a heavy sigh, he tugged it back out and handed it over. And kept his eyes on hers, flat and set and with his body rigid as she took it to scan the lettering. 

It looked completely legit. Felt that way too. The photo was… not bad, even if it in no way reflected how incredibly hot the subject was. Probably all the undead guys who worked for WR&H had gotten one, complete with the falsified birthdates. According to this, Spike was born October 19, 1977, and his name was…

Oh my God.

They’d put his real birth-name on it. Holy, holy crap, no wonder he didn’t want her to see it.

Lifting her other hand, she ran her fingers lightly over the print, amazed. “Are these all…”

“Yeah,” he answered in a tight voice, and held a hand out in a request that was just shy of demand. “Birthdate always changes on it, though, isn’t that clever? Nice little bit of mojo they got goin’ so we can all feel good about bein’ ancient. Accordin’ to the numbers, I’ll always be soddin’ twenty-seven and a bit.”

She blinked a little, staring at the birthdate. “Wait, so next year it’ll say…”

“Same date, but seventy-eight, yeah? Soddin’ pricks’ll do _that_ —keep some spell on all the paperwork in existence—but they won’t change the bloody name. Have a file on everyone ever works for or against ‘em down in records, so soddin’ comprehensive I swear they know more about me than I do. Shite down there _I_ don’t even remember doin’. _Reams_ of documents. Names of my bloody siblings in that bugger.” His fingers twitched pointedly. “Though, got to tell you; the one they have on Peaches is a sight longer’n mine, so at least there’s that. And he’s got to go around with an ID says ‘Leslie’ on it.”

_“Leslie?”_ Dawn half-shrieked.

“Liam Leslie Reilly,” Buffy filled in in an aside, because she was only barely listening at this point. She honestly couldn’t quite tear her eyes away from the four names printed in black-and-white across the scratched and dully-shining surface of the plastic card. She ran her fingers across the letters again. /Just… Who knew?/

“Okay, wow.” Dropping her bag, Dawn bounced on her heels. “Don’t I get to see it?” And she leaned over, trying to get a glimpse of the object in Buffy’s hand. 

Coming back to life, Buffy swiftly handed the ID back to Spike. “No.”

Something relaxed in him as he shoved it briskly back into his wallet and stuffed the thing back into his duster. And his eyes, as he caught hers again, went from tense and flat to warm once more, gratitude touching lightly at the edges of their claim.

Dawn pouted. “Why not?”

Buffy kept her eyes on Spike. “Because it’s not mine to show you. Because it’s up to Spike. Because it sounds like he’s not ready for you to know.” A little shake of the bleach-blond head. “Sorry, Dawn. You’re gonna have to live with the mystery for a little longer.”

“Oh, man… Why do _you_ get to know, and I don’t?”

Buffy felt her lips twitch as she reached down to retrieve her duffel bag. “Well, for one thing, I’m sleeping with him.”

Spike smirked a little as he picked up his own suitcase. “Earns a bird a few side-benefits.”

“Oh jeez. Whatever.” Hoisting her own duffel up to her shoulder, Dawn flounced ahead to the rental office door in a state of put-upon offense.

One she was thoroughly out of earshot, Buffy started walking again, Spike keeping slow pace beside her. His head was tilted a little in her direction, a hint of curiosity in his frame, as if he were waiting for her to ask. Finally she did, but only because it almost seemed like he wanted her to. “Was Jamison… your mother’s maiden name or something?”

“Yeah,” he answered after a short pause. “Rare way to let her keep it, for that time, to put it on a child. But I was a bit of the apple of her eye an’ all.”

Buffy smiled a little, looking out across the parking lot. “I can’t imagine why.” She hitched her bag a little higher to the point of her shoulder. “What about ‘Esmond’?”

He lifted one shoulder and dropped it. “Mum again. Means ‘grace, beauty, and protection’ or summat, that the child who bears it will be protected by God.” His mouth twisted a little around the edges. “What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her, I suppose.”

“I don’t know…”

His head jerked her way. “Don’t be daft, Buffy.”

“I’m just saying; maybe it goes the other way. I can see that.”

He shook his head a little as they entered the building. “You’re barmy, pet. But I like you fine.”

“I suppose that’s a good thing.” A thought occurred to her as they approached the desk where Dawn waited impatiently. “What does William mean?”

Spike sobered a little, and his eyes focused sharply on hers. “Resolute protector; shield of the people.”

“Huh. What do you know.”

Spike’s lips quirked as he turned toward the rental counter. “Liam’s short for William too; or Uilieam anyway. But you know what Jamison means, yeah?”

/Always with the war. God, what now?/ “I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” she answered dryly.

The smirk widened. “Son of the usurper, ready to take back his own.”

“Oh my God.”

Chuckling, Spike stepped forward to lay his hand on the counter.

***

His reason for insisting on the rental came clear the minute they were out of the lot. Once out of sight of the Enterprise guy, Spike immediately drove them around to some random alleyway… and promptly pulled over to step out of the little hatchback. “Alright, Bit.”

Dawn, who had been head-down in her Discman right about then, lifted her head to stare. “Alright… what?”

“Yeah, Spike,” Buffy echoed suspiciously. “Alright what?”

“Time for that drivin’ lesson I promised.”

“Oh my God, _really?”_ Dawn squealed, and threw off her headphones to clamber toward her door.

Buffy groaned. “You’re gonna get us all arrested.”

Spike rolled his eyes and held the door for the still-shrieking Dawn. “Just wait till I get in the other side, Niblet. And check your mirrors. I’m a bit taller than you are, still. At least, anymore.”

Dawn complied as he sauntered around the car to squeeze in behind her. She was obviously beside herself with excitement, the way she bounced over to the pilot's station, so Buffy didn’t bother to try to talk her sister out of it. She was too busy glaring at her lover as he slipped into the back seat. “You know this is completely illegal, right? You’re gonna lose that fancy fake license of yours, and that insane insurance we paid for in there, and that affidavit you signed saying you’re the only one who’d drive the…”

“She’s just takin’ it for a spin, Buffy; relax. Besides; I couldn’t lose that license if I tried. Tried to shred it once and it put itself back together by the time I turned back around. Don’t think the police could out-mojo it.” He nodded at the back of Dawn’s head. “Alright, Bit. You ready? Got good command of your blind-spots?”

“I think so!”

“Then let’s see if we can find us a place to eat, yeah?”

“Oh my God, this is so exciting!”

Buffy closed her eyes. “Just don’t crash, alright?”

***

They didn’t crash. Actually, Dawn did amazingly well under Spike’s frighteningly sedate tutelage, and they managed to get all the way to a restaurant unscathed. After which point, to Buffy’s everlasting relief, Spike took over, and an ecstatic, bubbling Dawn went back to sitting with her music and bouncing her head in the back seat, well pleased with the events of the day. 

Buffy was just grateful they’d escaped with their lives. Though she had to admit, her sister really did drive better than she did, and it was probably a testament to how nervous driving made Buffy, that she had found the entire thing so harrowing. /Maybe I’m not good at it ‘cause I’m such a control freak. I know how to work my body, but cars? It’s probably like guns. If I’m not in charge of all the parts, it just gets in my way./

After dinner and a quick side-trip to explore half of San Jose in search of onion blossoms, Spike drove them to a nearby motel. No more motorhome, thank God; they would spend tonight somewhere they could stretch out for a change in—bless all that was holy in the universe—two separate, decent-sized rooms. 

Buffy showered for about a year and a half in the tiny bathroom, her only regret being that there was only room for one in the miniature cubicle. Spike remained outside, awaiting his turn and happily picking at the remains of the onion blossom they’d eventually found for him at this dive diner down the road. 

On the other side of the wall, Dawn had the TV in her room blaring something clearly designed to drown them out, as if she assumed that the very first thing they intended to do was have loud, raunchy sex all over every nasty surface of the cheap motel room. Which, they didn’t. Probably. The intent was to have relatively quiet sex over maybe one and a half of the surfaces. The ones that appeared to be the least contaminated… which one hoped included at least the sheets, if not the top cover, of the bed, and maybe, just possibly against one of the inside walls. If they were lucky. 

They had definitely had sex in oogier places. And honestly, Buffy was fairly tired of doing it vertically by this point, so she’d settle for a little time spent horizontal and with the space to stretch out and really get into it. 

None of that meant they couldn’t use at least some of the rest of the room for foreplay, though. And, you know… maybe to make a point. /I may not be able to paint or write poetry, but…/

She exited the steam-filled bathroom, hair wrapped in one of the (hopefully bleached) body towels, the rest of her wrapped in a much smaller model that barely covered her from, oh, say, areolas to more or less most of her pubic region. It didn’t leave much to the imagination, and yes, she had definitely switched the towels on purpose, because it was fun to catch Spike’s attention in exactly the way that… Well, would you look at that?

His eyes rose from the limp remains of his fried onion feast, caught on her. And he turned into a statue. Cleared his throat once. And then sat back in his chair, extremely casually, like a waxwork come to life. Hitched a practiced leer to his face, but one that did very little to hide the naked desire poorly concealed beneath the shoddy breastwork of cocky resolve, and grinned broadly. “You, ah, enjoy the shower, pet?”

“I might have left you a little water.” She sauntered a little closer, aware she looked very pink and damp and that his reaction had very little to do with her actual variable state of coverage. He had, after all, seen her far more naked than this. 

It was all to do with the ease of removal, really. Towels were funny like that. They did strange things to the brain. “You gonna get in?”

The casual posture fled. “Bugger the shower.”

She let her smile out. “You’re too easy. C’mon. Go ahead; I’m not going anywhere. I’ll even keep the towel on.” And she canted her voice over to something a little more flirtatious. “Spike. Give me something to take off you, too.”

He pushed himself to his feet and stalked a step nearer, clearly lacking all interest in showers. “Got plenty you can take off me right now. How about you strip a towel off me tomorrow?”

Buffy backed away, turning for the steamy room. “I’ll stay inside. Keep all rosy.” She lifted an eyebrow at him in challenge. “I wanna watch you.”

He stopped stock-still to stare at her… and then sagged abruptly, groaning. “Oh bloody Christ, Buffy, are you sayin’…”

She focused her gaze directly on his. “I’d like to play with some directives tonight, William. In very good faith. If you’re down.”

A clear shiver ran over his frame, from head to toe. He closed his eyes briefly, and she saw him swallow. When his eyes opened, they were intensely blue; like a picture she had seen once of the inside of a glacier, lit by the sun. “Christ, Buffy… that sounds…”

“Is that a yes?” She needed consent, for sure, before she proceeded. 

Another swallow, then… “Yes. Bloody hell yes.”

It was a very broad gesture, considering he had no idea what she had in mind. So much trust. “Get in the shower, Spike,” she told him, low and commanding. “Let me call the shots. I’ll tell you when to get out, and then I’m all yours.”

His hands shook visibly, but his foot was already lifting preparatory to walking in that direction. “Oh, bloody hell.”

“I think you can handle it. Pun intended.”

He took another step. “Sodding fucking God. And people call me evil…”

She jerked her chin at his belt. “Actually… First, take off your pants, Big Bad.”

He halted. His hands, still trembling a little, dropped obediently to his belt. He unhitched it, undid the button. Lifted his head to catch her eye. “Are you serious about this, Buffy?”

“A little slower. I wanna enjoy the show.”

“Christ.” He hastened to obey. Or, really, slowed to obey. And, really, the best part about this whole thing was that, if it was his idea, Spike could turn a situation like this into the cockiest, most smug display ever… but now that she’d taken charge he was practically blushing. It was adorable. He was so ridiculously cute whenever she caught him off guard, made him realize that she just really, really wanted him. That she thought he was sexy and gorgeous… and she needed to do this more often, so he didn’t have to ask for it with lip-biting bravado. 

The zipper was down, and he was just kind of standing there awaiting instructions. He honestly looked at a loss. God, he was adorkable. “Pants. Off.”

Watching her warily, he slithered them down. His cock, thoroughly baffled, was at half-mast; probably because whatever sexy designs he’d had on her a moment ago had been startled into confusion by her abrupt change in his plans. Smiling benevolently, she nodded encouragement. “How much do you think it would take to convince little Spike Junior there that everything’s fine?”

Standing there with his jeans puddled around his ankles, Spike shot her a baleful glance, then peered doubtfully down at the undecided member of the jury. Reached down and took the gentleman in hand… and stood there, watching her and stroking himself firmly, head tilted just a little to one side.

“God, you’re beautiful.”

He jerked, full-bodied, and shock blasted through the claim, followed swiftly by a shy pleasure. And she saw his cock swell visibly; not from what he was doing, but from her words. “Buffy…”

“Take your shirt off. Let me see you.”

Letting go of himself so that his cock bobbed freely, now a cheerful participant in proceedings, he reached down to catch the hem of his tee and, with another brief, blue glance at her as if he couldn’t quite make out what her game was, he pulled the thing over his head. As he did so, she admired the long lines of his obliques, the sculpting of his ribs, the perfection of his rosy little nipples on those lovely, understated pecs, the firm sweep of his abs. And, god. Those arms. As they dropped back down and he tossed the shirt to the floor to watch her again, she stalked closer. Walked around him, perusing the goods. “Mmm.”

“Mmm?” he asked, sounding entertained now, and followed her progress around him. 

_“Mmmmm,”_ she agreed, and then, smirking, slapped a hand hard on the perfect swell of his ass. “C’mon. Let’s go.”

She could swear he bit back a ‘Yip!’ of shock. He definitely jumped a little. But she was already leading the way toward the tiny bathroom. Though, of course, once they gained the doorway, she signaled him to precede her, because that butt really deserved a second viewing. And besides; from this angle she got to watch as he turned to duck into the shower, and his shoulder lowered to hers. Which meant she got to admire the healing mark she’d made on his neck, and that was still kind of a thrill.

As he straightened to slap the water on he caught her looking at the bite. Saw the smug satisfaction written on her face… and lifted a brow. “Admiring your handiwork there, Slayer?”

“Can I help it if you’re pretty? All rough around the edges, with ‘property of Buffy’ just right there…”

He grunted. “Lettin’ this claim thing go to your head, Love.” 

There was not a trace of rancor in his voice as he said it; only bland amusement. As such she snorted and leaned back against the wall. Tugged the door closed. “So says the guy who folds up like a house of cards every time I breathe near the thing.”

He cranked the water over, fiddling with the temperature. “You’re one to bloody talk,” he shot back, and planted both hands on the cheap fiberglass to lean his head under the tap. 

“Point,” she agreed easily.

He came out from under the low-grade torrent and turned his head toward her, hair dripping now around his eyes as the mousse washed out. “What’s next, Love?”

She nodded at his scalp. “Hair.”

“Oh, bloody hell. You with the hair…”

“I want you all dripping and gorgeous when you jerk off in front of me.”

He trembled again. “Christ, just how far are you gonna take this, Buffy? Just knowin’ you’re standing there watchin’ me is like to drive me straight off my trolley!”

“Sounds fun.”

“Sodding fucking God… I didn’t know you were so christing sadistic.”

“Yes you did.”

“Well…” He shook his head, little dribbles of mousse-water running down onto his shoulders. “I did, but more with things like… Christ. You can use your claws like the kitten you are; and hell, I’ll purr for you all day, but this is…”

“Abuse?”

He sighed and reached for the bottle of shampoo she’d left in there for him. Neither of them used motel stuff, for sure, and in fact, at this point they basically shared hair-care products. “Just this side of torture, yeah, you terrifying chit.” And he shoved a palmful of the stuff through his curls.

Watching, her palms itched to try to fit herself in there and wash it for him, if only because she knew exactly what kinds of sounds he made when she massaged his scalp for him. But since it wasn’t possible right now in these close quarters, she simply waited patiently until he finished the process and had his rinse, slid some conditioner in, before nodding at the soap. 

They had done away with the godawful stuff he’d had in his crappy apartment in favor of something she preferred, and, not at all adverse, he used it too. It wasn’t scented, after all, since Mom dying had curtailed her Bath and Body Works budget... and after years of slaying and digging grave dirt out of her skin, she had long since given up trying to smell like ‘peaches’ or ‘spring rain’. Besides, especially after working at the DMP when nothing had really masked the old grease odor no matter how perfumed, it had kind of seemed like a loss to stick to vanilla and jasmine and crap like that, and she had eventually defaulted to just ‘does it get me clean? Like, actually, truly unsticky, clean-feeling clean?’ 

These days she usually preferred just a nice, good-for-your-skin Dove bodywash… and really, nothing was wrong with using a thing like that when the person you loved came out of the shower smelling like nothing else but themselves. Of course, when she had first switched it had had nothing whatsoever to do with Spike saying something ‘disgusting’ about healthy Slayer sweat and how he didn’t give a damn about that burger hell as long as she still smelled like Buffy underneath and not ‘a bleeding fake garden’.

Nothing at all. She had simply chosen to give up the battle. That was all.

/Sure. And Torvald demons only have two navels./ 

Spike had the most adorable navel. He was running body wash over it right now, under his arms, up and down them, watching her as he did so. He wasn’t going too fast or being businesslike about it, but he wasn’t exactly trying to make a show of it either. Really, he was just kind of eyeing her warily, as if waiting to see what she would do next. 

Didn’t mean she wasn’t appreciative. 

“Lickin’ your lips there, Slayer. Saw you. See somethin’ tasty?”

/Alright. If you think you’re gonna get the upper hand again, you’ve got another think coming, Big Bad./ “Rinse off.”

He obeyed wordlessly, eyes steady on hers the entire time. And once he was free and clear from top to toes, she surveyed him for a moment, just enjoying his long, lithe form. “Any warm water left?”

“A bit. It’ll do.”

“Okay then. I want you to lean back against the back of the shower…”

He eyed her with extremely suspicious eyes, hair dripping all down his forehead and nape as he stepped gingerly away from the vague spray to follow instructions. 

“Good. Just your shoulders. Perfect. Now…” Stepping forward, she reached up into the open cubicle and wrenched the tight old nozzle upward so that the spray drizzled down, directly onto his canted-up hips. And stepped back with another nod. “Give me a show, William.”

He let out a low groan. “Buffy…”

“Close your eyes. I want you to listen to my voice. Imagine my hands on you…”

“Oh, sodding Christ.” His lids fluttered down over his sharp blue gaze, and, right hand planted against the wall to steady himself, he slid his left down to catch his cock again. Sat there, under the spray, waiting. 

“Imagine it’s me. How would I do it? Not how you do it for yourself, Spike… but how I would do it. How would I give you a handjob if I could fit in there with you right now?”

“Oh fuck…” He started to move, slowly; just his hand at first, in a slow, twisting rhythm that was, she had to admit, precisely what she would do, and had done, to him in the past; up, a little flick of the thumb, a little squeeze, and down in a long sweep. A tickling at his frenum till he trembled, another staying squeeze, and then a few more surging jerks to set a broken rhythm; something he’d never do for himself, something meant not to bring him to completion but to keep him on his toes, keep him on the edge. And, unbidden, his hips started to move. 

“That’s right,” she whispered, knowing he’d hear her over the low pattering of the weak water. “That’s right.” She could watch this all day. God, he was so unbelievably perfect. And even better that she got to _feel_ him, now. The sensations rocketed through him, into her; perked through her in… places. The rushing, pooling…

/Guh./

It kind of made it tough to wait and watch.

The thing was, he could feel her reactions too, obviously. Which meant he was speeding up inadvertently. And okay, she hadn’t told him to do that. “What do I do to you to keep you where I want you?” she asked; a quiet instruction.

“Buffy,” he whispered, and went a little faster still. Kept on with the broken, staccato rhythm while he pulled his chilled right hand from the wall and reached down to tug at his balls, to pull them away from himself. “Christ, Love…”

“Do you want me? Do you want my mouth?”

“Oh fuck…”

“Soon.”

The cords of his neck were already showing, the rushing speeding up undaunted inside him. She could feel it; the electricity pooling in his loins, his thighs, the prickling, quickening heat. God, this was fun. “Slow down.”

He groaned, but did as he was told. “Buffy, how long…” It wasn’t just his hips that were moving now. He was bobbing up and down on his feet already, from the balls to the heels and back, and she could feel the potential energy rising in him. 

“Hmmm. I want you to give yourself a good squeeze now…”

He did so, trembling. 

“Now let go.”

He dropped his hands away, pressed them against the wall of the shower, breathing unnecessarily hard.

Stepping closer, she slapped the water off. And held out a towel. “Come here.” 

His eyes snapped open, and he stared at her as if she had lost her damn mind. “Bugger. The. Bloody. Towel,” he informed her flatly as he moved toward the exit. His voice was hoarse, strained.

She grinned teasingly. “I’m just gonna dry off your hair. We don’t want to spend the night in a wet bed…”

He let her wrap the thing around him, give him a rough chafing off as he stepped out, then stood just outside the shower, fists clenching and unclenching like he was on the verge of an aneurysm or something while she toweled off his head. He was probably biting back about a thousand livid comments at her apparent cavalier treatment of his abused manhood while she ignored his bobbing, desperate situation to catch the drips that ran down his back, his butt, the backs of his legs. The frustrated urgency rose in him with every second spent untouched, every muscle tense, his entire body held tightly clenched. /Mmm./

Just when he looked about to explode or something she, without another word, dropped the damp towel to the floor, plopped herself unceremoniously onto her knees on it, and caught him in her mouth.

“Oh bleeding fucking God, oh Christ, oh Buffy…” His hands were on her head and it was clearly all he could do in this world to keep from driving into her with everything he had. His hot, wet asscheeks under her hands were clenching and unclenching rhythmically in a desperate struggle to stay something remotely like still, and she was already tasting him. “Buffy, Buffy, Buffy…” he chanted.

She pulled one hand away to grip him and give him a little extra pressure as she feathered her tongue over his slot. His hips jerked hard, already losing control. And for the first time in a very, very long time, she pulled off of him and just watched him come, slipping her hand up at the last moment to save him from himself, because he really did just get out of the shower. And shot him an innocent look when he stared at her in shocked disbelief. “What? We still have a long night ahead of us. You don’t get everything all at once.”

“Oh, you bleedin’ bitch,” he growled, and, dragging her to her feet by her arm, ripped the barely-there towel off her not-particularly-covered torso. “You’re so gonna pay for that.”

“Can I at least have that back long enough to wipe my hand off?” she asked as he dragged her bodily toward the bed, but it was too late. The miniature towel was already on the floor and she was far, far away from it. 

“Bloody hell no.” He picked her up and more or less threw her onto the bed. “You’ve had your fun, Slayer. Now you’re gonna see some soddin’ payback!”

“Oh?” she asked, entertained. “What exactly did you have in mind?” 

“Hell if I know!” he answered, and tore the other towel off of her hair with a snarl. “I’m makin’ this up as I go. Sodding Christ!”

She heard herself laughing as he knelt above her, looking something between totally irate and a little at a loss. “I have complete faith in you.” She stretched her arms out on the bed and offered him a little smile. “You want to take a minute to relocate your brain cells? I can be patient…”

“Oh, shut it, you minx!” he growled, and dove for her body. And then slowed abruptly to run a wondering hand along her still-bright flesh and sighed, shaking his head. “Just, first I have to get over loving you so bloody much that I don’t even care when you drive me completely sack of hammers like that. Fuck, Buffy. Callin’ me things like…”

“Beautiful?” she asked, and reached out with her dry hand to touch his cheek. “You are, you know. But I don’t get to tell you much unless I’m a little rough with you first. Or else it’s not, you know… convincing.”

His eyes fell closed, and his shoulders shook a little. And then, very slowly, he lowered his head until his face was pressed to her belly. She could feel the swell of emotion in him; vast, unnamed. And then he had her hips up, her ass cradled in his hands. “I’m gonna worship you till you forget your name, Love,” he warned, very, very quietly.

“Okay,” she answered, and slid her fingers into the damp tangle of his hair. 

“And…” He went very still. “Don’t… call me William for a bit, alright? Need a second, or I’ll turn to a soddin’ nancy, and I can’t serve you proper when I’m fallin’ to pieces.”

She smiled at the crown of his head. He really did put a whole lot of pressure on himself. “Can I call you that after?”

“Oh, hell…” he whispered, and slid down to bury his face between her legs.

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
End of segment, finally. We have completed most of our road-trip. How about that!   
  
Though, the end of said trip might surprise everyone. (Speaking of, fair warning, we have one chapter left in Pt. 3 of this series, and then we can head straight-line to Pt. 4!)  
  
Thank you, as always, for your continued patronage.


	25. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we are. The bridge to the future is complete. We will be moving on to Pt. 4 within the next couple of days.  
> (If anyone's into that kind of thing, the song for this chapter is “Swan Song” by Lana Del Rey.)
> 
> I hope y'all like this wrap-up of this quiet (not-so) little story that (literally) moves us from Hell to Home so we can begin again.
> 
> Thank you all from the bottom of my heart for going on this road trip with me. I've enjoyed every minute.

  
  
“You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.” 

* * *

With most of Dawn’s stuff safely put away in an on-campus storage, they only had to deal with the things she had decided she would need for the next four months. The wardrobe choices had been a bit of a crapshoot, of course, since they really weren’t sure yet where they were going to end up, but ‘somewhere with a beach’ precluded a lot of climate options. Spike’s additional ‘not somewhere it rains all the bloody time’ put another bit of spin on the discussion, and Dawn ended up choosing clothes that leaned toward warmer climes. “Now the question is, Buffy… Back to Europe? North Africa? Mexico? Goa?” Spike tilted his head, watching her with interest. “Hear the Maldives can be bloody quiet. Figure we should pick somewhere relatively peaceful…”

“No big demon-activity in the Maldives?” Buffy teased, but really, just the thought of having a choice in her future was overwhelming. Since she had been a literal child, she had always gone where she was brought or sent, or where her duty took her. She had never had something a simple as a _choice_. 

Dawn, facedown over the magazines and books they’d gathered in the San Jose Public Library, was trying to be helpful, and was as clearly wholly unaware of her sister’s small existential crisis. “God, look at this place, Buffy! Did you see the _beaches?_ And wow, the buildings are so _cute!”_

Buffy glanced at the photo of some incredibly bright place with incredibly bright bungalows in incredibly bright colors, and frowned at the incredibly bright light. It gave her the wig, honestly, and her eyes drifted uncertainly to Spike’s.

“I know how to stay out of the bloody sun, Buffy. Lived in California for how long?” He made a sour face and poked a book at her. “Better than putting up with rain. We got you the soddin’ hell out of Scotland, yeah? Place rains buckets nine months of the bloody year. Amazing they get any footballing in in that soggy country.”

Buffy frowned at him. “You mean the soccer thing?” An old memory drifted into focus, brought to light only in context of a few months lived in staccato familiarity with things UK. “I remember you mentioning, what’re they called? Manchester United once. Never saw you watching soccer, though…”

“Couldn’t get cable to watch the bleedin’ BBC in the crypt is all.” He tossed aside another guidebook. “Barely even saw the World bloody Cup down there. Bunch of troglodytes, the US.”

“So… you’d like to live somewhere where soccer’s a thing?”

He narrowed his eyes at her as if he were wondering if she was teasing, then let out a low scoffing sort of exhale. “Footie’s ‘a thing’ everywhere else in the world but your backward country, pet. They play football under burkas in bloody Afghanistan, much less in the places we’re lookin’. I’ll get my fill in, no fear.”

“Oh. Okay.” 

His voice went soft, quiet. “Stop worryin’ about what I’ll like, Buffy. First let’s find a few options you feel good about, and we’ll narrow it down, yeah?”

Her eyes lifted to his, anxious. “You have to live there too.” Honestly, the whole entire thing was making her feel way uncertain. The choice. Making it. Having one. _All_ of it.  
  
It was so much responsibility; for him, for her, for _Dawn._ It was just... so _much._

“Lived damn near everywhere," Spike informed her roughly. His tones informed her that he had accurately read her anxiety and hated that she felt it. "I’ll make do; find a nice pub and a decent corner store, somethin’ to enjoy on the telly.” A little half-mile lifted the corner of his mouth, and he had that light in his eyes again. Something rippled along their link, from the center of him to wash over her. A wave of reassurance, and of that anchoring, vast, eternal love. It centered her; grounded her on him, because she knew that feeling. It was _Spike._ It was 'never going anywhere, Buffy'. It was 'as long as he's with me I'm home, because he'll never be anywhere I'm not, ever again'. 

“Doesn’t soddin’ matter where I am," he reminded her, and his eyes on hers blazed like blue flames, sure where she was not. "Long as you’re there, that means I’m home.”

Sometimes he just destroyed her, the way he felt about her, the way he looked at her. Especially now, with that flooding rush filling her; rooted adoration and certitude. “Oh,” she answered in a low whisper. “Me too, you know.”

He pulled another book off the pile, pleasure flooding their bond. “Well then.” And it was clear he was trying very hard not to look deeply pleased.

“Oh my God, you two are adorable.” Dawn’s voice turned stern. “And so not helpful!”

Buffy blinked her sister into focus, feeling more than a little embarrassed. “Sorry. I just…” She shrugged a little. “This is so hard. I have no idea what I…”

“You want beaches that face north or south, right?” Dawn sounded completely in charge of things. She was diving into this quest in a totally businesslike fashion, books and magazines piled around her in neat, organized columns and with every one opened to a specific page. She was acting like this was a standard research trip; like they were looking for a baddie to fight, not a place to live. “I think that means unless we wanna end up somewhere where you’ll have to punch every guy we meet—which so does not sound quiet—we’re kind of stuck with either somewhere off the North Mediterranean, or, like, whatsitcalled, the Black Sea… does that even count as a beach? Or India, or all that part of the world. I mean, really, we could probably find some parts of other places that have ‘em, like Mexico or maybe way north in South America, but just in general…”  
  
Spike cleared his throat. “Yeah, the Black Sea has beaches of a sort, Niblet. Probably not the type we’re thinkin’ of, and the winters can get a bit stiff there.”

“Oh. Well, then, never mind…” She flipped another page. “Oooh, is this that Goa place? Wow!” 

“They speak English in India,” Spike offered, “so there’s that.” He shot Buffy a smirk. “Good footie. And bloody good curry, seein’ as they invented it.”

Buffy winced. “Dang. That might be out just from a dietary aspect. I can handle some spicy food, but I never quite got the hang of that stuff when I was in the UK. That's kind of an all-you thing.”  
  
"And me," Dawn piped up. "I thought it was yum-sauce."  
  
"You would," Buffy shot back. "But your tongue is made of stainless steel."  
  
"You know it!" Dawn answered cheerfully, and reached for another magazine, to peruse the next choice.  
  
Spike's eyes landed on Buffy's with a faint grin. "Could always take up smoking, pet. Then you wouldn't taste a jot of it."

She threw a stubby little library pencil at him. "Okay, ew."

Catching it deftly in midair, he bent over and crossed Goa off the list. "Was joking, and you know it, Slayer." Shooting her a purse-lipped, brow-raised glance of amusement, he shook his head and waggled the tiny length of wood in her general direction. "Leave off tossing bitty stakes at me, yeah?"   
  
"Oh, jeez." Man, she was nervous. What if she chose a place they all ended up hating, or...  
  
A cool hand dropped to cover hers. "Hush. We're choosing together. It'll be a consensus." And her hand was lifted to his mouth, favored with a familiar brushing of lips and set back onto the table. "Right, then." Laying aside the mostly-useless utensil, he reached out to pull up another book. “Well, at the risk of getting’ too close to our friends in the Organization of Bits, there was that idea of Granada, though it’s not on the coast. Rest of Spain in general, parts south. Or, as Niblet mentioned, there’s places like Venezuela and Columbia, or Honduras and bits of Mexico as you both know a bit of Spanish, and have enough of an ear for it just from growin’ up where you did to maybe pick up more. Some of those places are a bit dangerous, though. Or we could look in the former French colonies, since you did a bit of French in school…”

“How the hell do you know that?”

Spike very carefully did not answer as he paged through the book.

“I’m betting he picked that up from his days as ‘totally crushy puppy-dog Spike’,” Dawn put in sagely. 

The book on Spain was abandoned in favor of self-defense. “Oi! I was _not_ a puppy! I was _hunting_ …”

“Uhuh.” The amount of scorn her sister managed to invest in that single exhalation was genius; Spike’s response, priceless. He leaned back in his seat, eyeing the younger Summers with a jaded expression and a slightly hunted hunch to his shoulders, and god, Buffy was never going to get over their dynamic. How had she missed out on this before? Her lips were sore from stretching them out so hard to keep them from writhing into an amused smile over and over again, because Dawn, it seemed, lived to tease Spike until he pulled his hair out. 

It would never cease to entertain her, considering that having her younger sister give this former marauder hell for borderline stalking her in the old days was fairly amusing in retrospect. After all, in hindsight, Spike had only been doing what any predator would; using the skills of the hunt to suss out what his objective did, how she moved, what her haunts were, her patterns, et al. How she smelled, what she preferred… It had been all about the unconscious adaptation of hunting instinct to the obsession of unrequited love, and the more he’d learned about her, the harder he’d fallen. And, well, it was kind of hard to be mad about it now, since back then his nearness and knowledge had saved her life about a zillion times, and eventually it had earned her the dedicated presence of the love of her existence. /I can’t really say ‘life’, since at this point he’s loved me through, what? Two and a half?/

Still. Dawn’s razzing was on point, and the results were bomb as hell. Spike just always got so _rattled_ whenever she cornered him on a technicality. It was great. 

Or, it was till Buffy was caught enjoying it too much at her guy’s expense. The problem with the stupid claim sitting between them was, hiding your expression didn’t help at all if the other person could feel your amusement. “What’s so bloody funny?” he demanded, turning away from Dawn to round on her, all forbiddingly.

Buffy belatedly opened her mouth, aware it was time to rally quickly to his defense and head off the low-grade war before she was pulled into it. She was forestalled, though, by Dawn’s next sally. “Probably she’s remembering that wrecked box of chocolates…”

 _“Oi!”_ Spike half-roared, surging to his feet. A few heads turned in their direction. 

A whole lot of alarm was crawling around through their bond right now… and maybe even a dose of Spike-ish mortification. “Box of what, now?” she asked curiously.

“Wring your scrawny neck, I will, Dawn, for bloody chrissake! Show you to talk out of turn…”

Dawn was grinning like she’d just successfully poked a bear with a stick. “Oh, you mean you never gave those hideous things to her?” She tilted her head, a gesture that she also seemed to have picked up in mimicry of Spike. “Good,” she pronounced finally. “They were just _so_ bad.”

“Buffy, I want you to forget everything that’s just happened. I’m going to go kill your sister and bury her beneath a flowerbed…”

“Spain looks really pretty, actually,” Buffy broke in, voice strained but hopefully enough to end the horrified standoff. Spike was going to spontaneously dust or something if she didn’t save him. He’d tried to bring her _chocolates?_ /Oh my God, you were so sunk./ What a ridiculous thing for anyone to bring her, much less a _vampire_. /Much _much_ less _him_ …/ Jeez, he’d tried so damn _hard_. 

Spike’s head swiveled around toward her at this pronouncement. He looked thrown. “Spain?”

“Yeah. I mean, Mexico’s probably nice too, but Spain’s got the south-facing coast, and maybe it’s too close to a lot of the Organization, but it’s also close enough if they need us, right? Kind of split the difference?” She reached out to cover his hand with hers as he slowly sank back into his chair. “It doesn’t really matter, does it, as long as it’s far enough away for us to stay lost and keep me out of the way of guilty temptation. And mostly that means making sure they don’t know where we are. We can do that no matter where we go, so we might as well cut down on the travel costs if we need to get close quick for an apocalypse.”

Distracted, if not mollified, he tilted his head slightly in an attempt to read her. “Alright. And the Spanish bit?”

“Well, every Californian learned a bunch of sort of baby-talk Spanish in elementary school. It's a place to start from. And I learned enough Italian to get by pretty quick. So did Dawn, so I should be able to pick up Spanish quickly enough too…”

Dawn grinned brightly. “I learned a lot faster than you, actually.”  
  
“You were in school,” Buffy cut her off flatly. “You had an advantage.” She lowered her voice. “I was negotiating with demons. Demonology language is a different kind of Italian than ‘here’s your homework’.”

Dawn’s smile subsided to something slightly more sober. “You’ve got a point, I guess.” And then she bounced in her chair. “Anyway… how weird will it be to do this? I mean, we’re used to sort-of Spanish things, but not really, you know? The Spanish won’t be the Spanish we’re used to, and the food will definitely be different.” She rustled through one of her piles and pulled out a guidebook. “Look. The buildings will probably seem… almost familiar but not. Like, look at all this… weird, arch-y stuff. It almost looks more like something we saw in Russia, or something you’d think you’d see in, I dunno, ‘Arabian Nights’, or…”

“There was the hell of a Moorish presence in Spain for a long damned time,” Spike interrupted, nodding at the photo of a columned structure full of Arabianesque piercework. “That’s the Alhambra. Bloody famous, that.”

“What’s ‘Moorish’?” Buffy asked, frowning. “I thought a ‘moor’ was some kind of landscape in England.”

“Different thing altogether, pet. This one’s a load of Muslim folks who came up from North Africa in the eighth century and got themselves a colony in Spain and bits of Sicily and Malta. They’re the reason, in a roundabout way, that the Spaniards and the Portuguese ended up in the New World, since they left behind the hell of a lot of technology that none of those poor medieval buggers had access to otherwise.” He flipped open another book. “What Europe didn’t go and nick from ‘em durin’ the Crusades, any road.”

Dawn frowned. “In school they made it all sound like Europeans just spontaneously developed a bunch of new tools for navigation and started sailing all over the place.” 

“Yeah,” Spike grunted, and turned a page. “And there’s a reason I said school’s a bit of a waste. Load of lies, a lot of it. Tell you plain, Niblet. Europe spent hundreds of years sittin’ in its own waste, fightin’ each other over the same ground, tryin’ to remember how to count to ten and get enough to eat, while places like Africa were makin’ sextants and spectacles and inventin’ algebra. We’re just bloody good at takin’ credit for the inventions we stole is all, ‘cause the one thing we got real good at over the centuries is fightin’.”

“They had better weapons, so they won?” Buffy asked quietly.

“And took the credit,” Spike agreed with a shrug, and turned the book he was holding, stretched it out toward her. “The further you get into the Mediterranean and away from Gibraltar, the more the coast starts to look like what you’re used to. Then it’s all finding a spot to fit to our purposes. Coast is split into three parts before it starts turnin’ east; La Costa del Sol, La Costa Tropical—which is the one closest to Granada, though that’s a ways inland—and La Costa Almeria…”

Buffy ran her fingers over the proffered photos, that overwhelmed feeling sliding up into her throat again to choke her. The pictures looked like California. They looked like home. But they weren’t, so they also looked like freedom.

And it was her _choice_.

***

She called to check in on Xander while they were dropping the car off at the airport Enterprise lot. She was a little late on this week’s check-in, what with one thing and the other, but there had been more going on this week than in the one where they’d been just sailing around the Mediterranean, or driving through the US not doing much. “So, yeah. The plan is to come back over to that side. Find somewhere quiet. Be close if you need us, but not too close.”

‘I’m really glad to hear it, Buff. And not just in case we need you. I dunno. Call me crazy, but it just gives me a warm fuzzy to know you’re not an ocean away.’

Buffy smiled into the phone, though Xan couldn’t hear it. “How are things?”

‘Oh, you know. The girls’ve settled down finally and are back to work. They're a little iffy about some of the new policies, but we're not giving 'em a lot of room to fight back. It's the new manual and they need to follow it.' A short pause. 'Satsu’s really killin’ it when it comes to training. She's like the Energizer Bunny; works till she drops.' He sounded slightly worried, but then his voice firmed up. 'I dunno if she's pulling such a hard line on the new system in your name, or what, but she's not letting any of the girls slide. And I hear the Brittany girls are mostly employing the new system too. And Andrew says Rome's also got it in place, and that the Azores girls are mostly following it, so...'  
  
Buffy let out a slow, relieved breath. She had almost been afraid to ask, but... /Thank goodness./ "Will you tell them thanks for me? I know it's a lot all at once, and I know the girls are probably kind of weirded out about it after what happened up there, but..."  
  
Xander's shrug was all but audible over the line. 'Don't worry. We're not gonna let 'em get out of it. You know I won't, and Satsu...' Another short hesitation, then, 'Okay. She's killing it out there on the practice field, but when it comes to meetings she's kind of on autopilot. I'm doing most of the planning. I swear she’s moping now that you’re gone.’ She thought she heard him frown. ‘I think you and Wil are maybe right about how maybe our second-in-command kind of had a crush on you.’

/Well, crap. Note to self that I still owe Spike a little something on that bet. Or, you know, a lot of something. Dammit./ Not that that was necessarily the most hideous prospect on the planet, but… 

Buffy hated losing. 

What she hated even more was being a cheater; and the fact that Spike hadn’t even brought it up since they’d left Scotland was kind of… irritating, almost. He’d let her skate by without it being a thing, but that was just turning it _into_ a thing, and that was not cool. 

He was going to make her admit she’d lost and pay up, all out loud and stuff, wasn’t he? 

Dick. “She’s not second-in-command now, Xan, and please, not you too.” Buffy had only half an ear for the conversation at the moment, because ahead of her, Dawn was dancing around Spike, trying fruitlessly to snatch his ID from him as he shoved it firmly back into his wallet. Judging by his movements, Spike was wearily telling her to give over as he pulled it back and slipped it into place… and their antics were making her lips twitch with suppressed mirth as she watched. It was kind of like watching a gangling Great Dane puppy try to win a tug-of-war with a sleek, battle-scarred, stronger-than-he-looked and very put-upon greyhound. And by the way, did everything Spike did have to look so unbelievably elegant? Even when he was irritated? Even his jerky, frustrated movements managed to look smooth and practiced, and just… 

/You’ve got it bad, Buffy. Of course, that’s a duh observation, but… all with the having it bad./ She remembered crushing on Angel, back in the day. Watching his every move with moony-eyed, girlish rapture and memorizing every change of expression, every flicker of mood from sullen to brooding to rare smile. But that study had been the kind of obsessive longing of the teenager who had had no idea how to apply the information she had been gathering. She had ended up using those daydream-ish imaginings to scrawl things like ‘Buffy + Angel 4ever’ on her high school notebooks, like a child, with no idea what the future could hold, believing everything with utter abandon… and knowing so very little about how all of it actually worked in practice. 

Here, now, watching a much wider range of emotion from a far more expressive man, she could see how wrong she had been about so many things. The reasons behind such greedy study, as if you could possess a person simply by hoarding glances, for one; or as if you could protect them from the vagaries of the Powers by the mere strength of your gaze, keep them safe and with you and force the future to be what you wished by the power of your love. 

/No. We can’t do any of that. But we can learn, and know. Use that knowledge to shape how we love each other. How we use that information determines how we walk in the world together. Determines how and when we will build what we decide _together_ to build, with neither one of us deciding any one thing without input. And in the end, whether we realize in time that it’s time to let someone go… and whether we learn in time exactly what to say and how, so we can hang on when everything starts to fall apart./

Sometimes, that was all there was. “Anyway, she’ll move past it now I’m not around anymore.” /Even if Satsu's… part of the demon really liked my part of it or whatever, one-sided things are still one-sided things for demons, just like for humans, and mine is claimed as hell./ “Life does this thing where it just… moves on, you know?” She smiled slightly to herself, decided to do some prodding to thoroughly change the subject. “How are things on the Renee front?”

Xander cleared his throat briskly. ‘Uh… Buffy, look. I’m not… You know, that’s just not… She’s really… I mean, I’m not really…’

Buffy grinned. “At ease, Xander. I’m just messing with you. Though…” She shrugged a little. “You _do_ kind of have a type.”

A heavy groan. ‘Oh my God, am I ever going to live that down?’

“Probably never.” Relenting time. “How’re things with having Wil back?” she hazarded, guarded but wondering.

‘Oh, you know; it’s actually been really great. Like old times, almost…’ A sad note entered his voice. ‘Except that you’re not here of course. But God, I missed that girl. I almost forgot how much till I saw her again.’

Xander and Willow had that whole brother from another mother thing going on, except with the one of them being a girl thing. They were basically exactly siblings, and how they had ever managed to have that bizarre affair still confused Buffy out of her mind. It didn’t make the slightest bit of sense to her, and mostly she just preferred to skip over that entire thing like a scratch in the record and pretend it had never happened. “I figured it would work out alright. Though probably Kennedy’s not liking it so much. I know the last time she came she was so not impressed with castle living…”

‘Oh, uh… Kennedy… didn’t come.’

Buffy was a little startled at that. She hadn’t asked before, had just assumed… “She didn’t?”

‘No, uh…’ Xander halted for a second, then picked back up with a note of regret in his voice. ‘I think maybe they’re kind of… on a break or something? I get the impression some stuff went down that Wil doesn’t really want us to know about; but anyway, she won’t talk about it really. She just kind of looks a little sad and says they’re “taking it slow for right now”. Which you and I both know is code for “kind of on a break”.’

Buffy winced. She had never exactly liked Kennedy for Wil, but the relationship had seemed to make her friend... well. contented, at least, if not totally, overwhelmingly, over-the-moon happy, like Tara had. And knowing what Buffy had learned by then, that sometimes contentedness was more than what you might be able to squeeze out of life? That was all that had mattered, so she had kept her mouth shut.   
  
Anyway, keeping her mouth shut had become kind of the order of the day in that last six months or so at Revello, since, really, if she wanted everyone to leave her alone about her regenerating, unlabeled, unidentified-relationship-thing with Spike, then that meant practicing some serious Golden Rule-age. And since at the time her thing with Spike had been (A) absolutely necessary to her continued existence and sanity, and (B) too tender a beast to poke (i.e. definitely not something she had wanted to disturb with too much conversation, much less put any tags on it in case it got away), she had so kept her mouth shut about everyone else’s relationship business. Willow wanted to explore the wilderness of sex with a tongue-ring? Sure, go at it, girl. Tell me about it later. It sounded… (Well, honestly, that still sounded kind of interesting, to be real.) Xander wanted to start things up again with a re-demoned Anya? Possibly terrible idea, but also possibly great idea, and really, who had brain cells to decide which? Also, probably totally not her call, and definitely _way_ not something she got to talk about, at _all,_ the whole maybe-possibly-getting-back-together-with-ex-demons-who'd-screwed-up-but-were-now-back-with-you-in-an-ill-defined-capacity-because-so-many- _feelings._   
  
Besides. At that point, just who had the energy to care?

She hadn’t had _time_ to get involved, anyway. Skirmishes in a war. Potentials-wrangling. Faith coming back to throw a bunch of insane mixed signals at her (which, okay, shut up, Spike). Watcher joining forces with Watcher-trained-Slayer-child-slash-brief-pseudo-boyfriend-material-guy-to-assassinate-precious-confidant-and-snuggly-ally. Assorted whispers and betrayals and weird politics. Seeing Dead People. General ‘The First’ shenanigans. And, you know, the great Hot Pockets mystery. Yadda. Who had time for poking into other people’s messy-ass romances?

She’d had enough problems trying to avoid thinking about her own as much as possible… until right there at the end, when it had been so way too late. 

Still, she had kind of thought that if Wil and Kennedy had lasted this long, they were kind of in it for the long haul… or at least a longer haul. “That sucks. I hope she’s okay.”

'I’ll get her to talk about it. No worries.’

“Good. If anyone can…" /‘Cause seriously; this is the guy who talked her out of ending the damn world. This’ll be a piece of cake./ “If she’s gonna talk about it to anyone, it’s you Xander.”

She heard his pleased smile over the line. ‘Yeah, well. Anyway, the girl was fiery, but I dunno. Maybe she was… too pushy for Wil or something? You know her. She likes ‘em a little more laid back.’

/See, that was my problem. Oz? Laid-back guy of the century, though obviously reliable as hell. Crush on you Xan? You’re only ever passionate when you think someone you love is in trouble. Other than that, you’re like, take-orders-guy. Completely submissive. Tara?/ 

Well, okay. Now that she thought about it, Wil really did have a type with the quiet people with hidden strength thing happening, because Tara had honestly been super tough in her own way. Yes, the girl had been incredibly sweet…but she had had this crazy core of iron, if wielded very gently. And… huh. Now that Buffy thought about it, Tara had totally had Wil wrapped around her finger. Willow had done everything Tara asked. Tara had never ordered her around the way Kennedy did; just asked all sweetly, but… 

/Oh. _Oh!_ / Realization flooded Buffy, informed by a much more well-rounded understanding, now, of certain relationship power-dynamics, and how they could be very different under the surface than what people saw in public. “Um, well… I think maybe Kennedy was just… more up front about being in charge, Xan,” she answered quietly. 

‘Huh?’

Certainty flooded her. “I think what we saw with Tara out in the world was not what Willow got behind closed doors.”

Quiet from Xander’s end of the phone, then, ‘Oh, God. You think that… Oh, man. Buffy, I need you to really stop talking right now.’

“I’m just saying. Tara was a lot tougher than we all gave her credit for with all that sweetness and light… and Wil basically did everything she ever said without even blinking once. All she ever had to do was look and nod a little.”

‘Oh God. Buffy, I’m begging you to stop.’

She shrugged a little. “Anyway, maybe Willow… rebelled against Kennedy or something, because she’s a Slayer now and she never got the witch thing, and…” Buffy frowned. “Deep inside I think… there’s a thing there.” Buffy couldn’t help but remember now some things Willow had said to her when she’d gone Dark. Some jealous things, some angry things, some things about who should be in charge… /Maybe it’s one thing to defer if it doesn’t get in the way of… old stuff. But if it does…/ “Anyway, it happens. Who knows. Or maybe Kennedy doesn’t wanna play anymore. But as long as Wil seems okay…”

Xander cleared his throat. ‘Uh, yeah. She seems… fine. Pretty okay. I mean… Yeah. She… God, Buffy, way to ruin my ability to talk to my best friend for, basically ever. What made you even think of…’

Buffy grinned, though her buddy couldn’t see it. “Being a Slayer who’s in a relationship with a vampire, you get to learn a thing or two about power dynamics.”

Another long silence, then… ‘Oh God. We so need to stop talking. Basically _ever_ again.’

Okay, this was kind of fun. Maybe she could tease Xander with this a little here and there for, you know, forever. “Oh, c’mon; it’s not like you don’t know what it’s all about. I’m sure you had your fun in the past…” Tender ground, maybe, but it had been a year, and maybe if Xander could smile about it, then there could be some healing?

He groaned audibly… but he didn’t shut down, so there was that. ‘I’m so not gonna talk about this with you, Buffy. You’re kind of one of the guys, but no. Not gonna go there.’

It was a start. “Okay. I’ll just assume I’m right until told otherwise.”

‘Oh man…’

“Anyway, are you guys working on the magick thing? How’s that going?”

She heard him clear his throat, heard the gratitude in his voice as they switched conversational gears. ‘Uh, it’s going okay. Wil says I have a small aptitude. Nothing super insane, thank goodness. Like, probably not enough for me to get crazy-hooked or anything, since I won’t be able to use it to do the stuff she did, like the easy day-to-day stuff. And I like accomplishing things with my hands. It gives me this weird satisfaction, you know? I like feeling tired and accomplished at the end of the day, not high and buzzy and... unsettled, if that makes sense.’

Buffy knew… and god, was she ever glad. Watching Willow go down that long road to addiction, doing everything with magicks, even cooking breakfast or getting something out of the fridge, had been terrifying. But then… even if Xander had had a similar need to control everyone around him, he had never done it in the same way. He'd threatened, obliquely, to remove his love from her a few times if she didn't act the way he wanted her to, which in retrospect was pretty jerkish, considering her abandonment issues, but that was just their weird way of pushing each other's buttons. They were getting past it, growing up. He didn't try to control people the same way Willow had; to get respect or to gain authority.   
  
And, like he said, he was a craftsman. He found a meditative satisfaction out of doing handiwork; a trait that sounded like it would stand him in good stead, now.

‘But it’s enough to accomplish a few useful things, I guess,’ Xan went on thoughtfully. ‘Like, I was able to back her up with a spell to make a copy of the Scythe to keep here for looks; you know, as kind of a figurehead deal, so none of the girls know you have it. She thinks it’ll keep the natives from getting restless or any other, you know, supernatural whatevers from wondering where it is and trying to hunt you down to look for it. Satsu held it and says it even feels almost the same, except not as strong, so I guess I can add mojo okay.’ He paused briefly. ‘That spell Giles gave us was way hand-picked to work with my level of ability, I guess, and what Wil calls ‘my Latin-leanings’. Which…’ A thoughtful pause. ‘Kind of means I guess the G-man knew where I was probably at, and... Buff, do you really think that means he suspected for a long time, and just…’

“Maybe.” Buffy frowned. “I’m starting to realize Giles plays a lot of things close to the vest.”

‘Huh. This is so of the majorly weird to find out so late in the game.’ His voice switched gears again. ‘Anyway, Wil’s doing a kind of a census of the Slayers now to see if anyone else here has magickal aptitude, and we’ve been recruiting around the area for shaman-types, mystics, whatever, to beef up the support ranks. She’s gonna hold some classes, get together a little Slayer-y coven so we can protect ourselves if there’s another attack with something we can’t fight like that, long-range. Then she’s gonna do a quick jaunt to the other cells to do the same thing and come back. Make this her base, but keep mobile and check in with the other cells regularly so that this whole thing doesn’t go bad; and maybe we’ll have some kind of neat, joint Slayer-y-witchy thing happening soon.”

“It sounds kind of… revolutionary.” Buffy was honestly having a tough time wrapping her brain around it. It still seemed almost heretical to think of Slayers who were also witches—who both were and had power—but if Wil was finding them, then that whole theory was being turned right on its head.

Spike moved in to join her, hand sliding to the small of her back, and bent, lips touching the soft skin behind her unoccupied ear. She shivered. Maybe it just seemed weird to her because it wasn’t hers. Because she didn’t want it. And who was she to judge what other people did with their abilities, when she was doing what she did with hers? “But as long as it works and everyone’s healthy and happy…”

‘Yeah, that’s the goal.’ Xander’s voice went cautious over the tinny line. ‘How about you, Buff? You healthy and happy?’

Spike’s hand slipped to her waist, dropped to join hers. As their fingers folded together, Dawn drew up close to join them, grinning and breathless and glowing. “Oh, yeah. I’m definitely both.”

‘Well, then… that’s all that matters.’

“Yeah.”

* * *

“A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.” 

* * *

Buffy came in from the remains of late afternoon sun. Took the drink her vampire held out for her and sipped it gratefully, then stretched out on her chaise lounge in the indirect light of the portico and watched as Dawn splashed around in the lapping surf as if she were thirteen instead of eighteen. “How did you score this place, again?”

Spike didn’t even bother to smirk. “I told you. I know a guy.”

Buffy turned an amused head toward him. He lay there, all languid relaxation; a long, pale, gorgeous creature made up of perfect angles juxtaposed against startlingly smooth-looking flesh. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen him wear so little. Usually he was either naked or fully-clothed; no halfway. But right now, here… Well. He was waiting for the sun to go down, for one thing, so he could get out there and enjoy the water with her (and to put up with being splashed by Dawn, roar about it, pretend to be annoyed, and secretly love it because he was included). For the other… this was Spike unguarded. It wasn’t all about just joining in. He had always stayed dressed around her until they were naked and all business because he had needed the armor. Nowadays…

In Hell-A they had lounged around naked together for half the day, sometimes. It had started out as just an expedience thing. Why wear clothes just to get them dirty if you weren’t going to be leaving the room? But what that had led to was their finally getting comfortable with one another in a non-sexual way; with just being around each other. That dynamic had changed when they’d come back to this dimension, with everything that came with that return. The tension, the uncertainties, the shifting definitions.

Now, here, with just them and with the realization that they weren’t going to allow anything to change, she thought they were getting back to it. To what and who they had become. So the armor was coming back off. And Buffy desperately loved him for it. 

Dawn’s commentary had almost significantly derailed progress, of course, though she hadn’t known it. “Jeez; it’s too bad you can’t tan. With abs like that, it’s just really unfair that you have to go around being so pale…” 

The two-sided blade of the observation had damn near sent Spike fleeing back inside for a shirt, but Buffy had forestalled his flight with an amused look that had had him grumbling and relaxing back into his chair with a sour twist to his mouth. “Niblet, go swimming or summat, yeah?”

Dawn had laughed and headed out toward the beach. “Coming, Buffy?”

“In a sec.” She’d turned back to Spike, laid a brief hand on said abs. “Don’t let her mess with you. You can’t afford to lose ground, or she’s going to start putting up little flags all over the place.” At his startled look, she’d smiled and bent over to kiss him lightly on the lips. “Isn’t that what conquerors do? Go around planting victory flags in places?”

Spike had grunted then, looking abruptly truculent. “She’s not planting any bloody flags in any room of this house.”

“That’s the spirit. She already beats you too often in that ‘Crash’ game…” 

Said comment had earned her an ferocious glare. “She bloody well does not! We’re at a steady draw! Even odds, Slayer; I’ve kept a sodding tally!”

“Uhuh.” Throwing him a grin over her shoulder, Buffy had sauntered for the beach with little glances back to see if her long-underutilized bikini was having the expected effect on him. 

It was. She had never worn such a thing around him, after all. 

Spike was no longer lounging in his seat. He was sitting up and watching her walk away with rapt attention. It was an activity she was pretty sure had occupied his time for the better part of the afternoon, though he was affecting a deep and indolent inattention as she returned to her station. 

She smiled, eyeing him now with tolerant affection. “You do know that saying ‘you know a guy’ makes you sound like you’re part of the Spanish demon mafia.”

Spike shrugged and took a careless swig from his flask. “It does, yeah, but really what happened was I dropped your name and mine, said we were hopin’ to find a quiet place to settle, they started faintin’ all over themselves about us takin’ out the Scourge for ‘em, and practically handed us the place on a silver platter.” He grinned then and held up the flask to tap against her glass in a toast. “I think as far as the demon world goes, we’re gonna coast on that one for, what? At least a decade?” 

Buffy felt a little bad about it as she returned the toast. After all, it wasn’t like she had gone out of her way to pick a fight with those assholes for the greater good of the demon world or anything. They’d come to her. But since it was kind of playing into their favor, she’d take it. At some point she might even use it, since it wasn’t like they’d done it all alone. The other Slayers should get some of the credit, and hopefully would in a way which, in combination with the new training manual, would eventually help in rebuilding Slayer-demon relations in future.   
  
/It's a start. Even if I didn't expect it, it would definitely be one way to use all this goodwill we accidentally built with our little extermination./ And, she would for sure capitalize on it, quietly, from the background. Later, when she wasn’t enjoying the peace and quiet. “It’s weird they had the place just sitting here, though.”

Spike snorted. “Doubt it. I think someone gave it up willingly. A sacrifice for the great heroes or some sodding shite. Anyway, I’m not about to ask a bunch of bloody questions if it means I get to kick back for a bit and enjoy watchin’ my girls in the sun in a place as is perfect for my needs. We need the nest more than whoever that other bugger is, and if he’s willin’ to give it up, more power to him.” He shrugged and took another swig. “B’sides,” he rasped around the swallow, “could use the relaxation after bein’ folded up in a bloody cargo-hold for seventeen sodding hours.”

Buffy kicked her own legs out. “At least you got to move about the cabin. Seventeen hours in coach sucks. Dawn had music. I had _Shrek 2_ and _50 First Dates_. I’m not sure which was less romantic; Adam Sandler, or the ogre.” 

That earned her another derisive snort. “Alright, you win,” he answered, and a cool finger slid up along her sun-warmed arm. “Made m’self a comfy bed on the luggage and had a nice NC-17 flick playin’ in my head for the duration.”

She gaped at him, amazement giving way immediately to horror, because having a soul absolutely had nothing to do with certain ethical backsliding that didn't cause lasting harm, and she well knew it by now. “Spike! Please say you didn’t… _do_ things on other people’s luggage!” Because he so would, and oh my god...

His smirk widened. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

“God, you’re so gross.”

“I may be dirt…” he reminded her with an insouciant grin.

He was horrible. And she loved him. “I am not going to roll in you until after Dawn’s asleep, and you know it, so stop. And also, you’re not dirt. You’re…” She paused, looking for something suitably redirect-y. “You’re just filthy sometimes. Which is totally different. And fun. And anyway, we should have just gone back to LA and stolen Angel’s jet from him, since he’s probably not even using it anymore…”

“Lot less fun when the Niblet’s in the same cabin,” he reminded her, and returned his gaze to where the teen in question was disporting herself in the sandy surf. His hand drifted out lazily, and his long, faintly callused middle finger trailed refreshingly cool up along the top of her sun-warmed thigh; not quite suggestively, but loving, exceedingly friendly, and in the way of letting her know that as soon as 'the Bit' was not in evidence he was very much at her service. 

They would negotiate around Dawn. And anyway, they were family-building. Besides, they'd already done the mile-high club thing. Borrowing that fancy jet again would've meant she would have had to negotiate with Angel again, and put Spike through dealing Angel again, which, well. Probably wasn’t worth the price of the not-ticket, even if it might be kind of amusing to see (or, at least hear) what her ex thought about the whole closed-claim thing. Which, they would no doubt definitely hear about it; at length, if they opened that door again. And honestly, Buffy just didn't have the energy right now, even if Spike had kind of sounded amused at the prospect.   
  
Buffy had just shrugged it off and hit the Organization up for plane tickets. She had said goodbye for a reason. /Anyway, I have the only part of the former Scourge of Europe I want right here with me./ The one who had always challenged her to grow and change, and had never tried to keep her small, or the same, or make her feel ashamed of who and what she was. The one whose every word had only ever been calculated to make her _see_ herself truly, for the first time. To question all that she had been taught to believe about her inner nature. To make her wonder, and to make her butt right up against the bars of her mental prison. 

To set her free. 

/That's all you ever tried to do. Set me free./ It was what Faith had also tried to do for her, years before, but she had failed because Buffy had not yet been ready to tread that line. To find it, nearly-invisible in the darkness, and walk it, that tightrope between outside ethics, the self-imposed superiority of ‘the warrior for good’… and a sense of self, pulsating in the dark like an awareness. Of vampires, and of other sensual hazards calling her out with a lust for violence and killing and sex; all the things she was made for. Had not been ready to question if she had been made for more than to be a lonely, sterile monument to ‘good’, nor to find that line in the gray dusk when her virtue depended on using the violence only against demons—but only certain demons, while the lines got fuzzier and fuzzier—and using the lust only on humans; except humans just didn’t satisfy, and demons…

Demons did. So she had had to learn, with Spike, to forgive herself for being what she was. To accept… and to integrate all that she had been before with what she had become after her Calling; what was now a part of her. The ancient hungers. To take, and keep, all that had been in her previous, human life, and wished to maintain… and jettison that which no longer served. To discard all that was a trap meant to hold her back, or make her hide from that line in the dark, amid the safety of simpler rules, like, ‘Only people with human souls are safe’, and ‘Only humans who live in the light’, and ‘Only vampires deserve to die… and then, always’. Because those rules were too black-and-white. Too young. Too foolish.

In the end they were wrong. Just as wrong as she had been about herself. 

It remained to be seen how the other, younger Slayers would travel this path. If it would be as difficult for them, without the dogma, the battle between two realities, the lies imposed from the outside. It was enough of a journey to transition from one life to another, without thousands of years of misinformation guarding them from the truth of who they really were.   
  
Faith had had a less difficult transition in a way, had always known what Buffy had had to learn with painstaking, agonizingly slow progress. But because finding that line had been so easy for her, she had also gone too far in the other direction, fallen swiftly to the other side. She had not had the anchors of the human side to cling to; no love, no family, no friends. /We fought opposite fights. She had to climb back to the center from the darkness and the wild and the dangerous parts. I only learned later how scary that road is; the one she walks. But she probably only barely understands now how hard it is to hold the line I held. To fight to set myself free of all the rules I gave myself to stay safe and be in control all the time, for everyone else. How I had to keep myself from discovering the things she could just... let herself feel./

How many of the younger Slayers would permit themselves to do that? To fail; because they had no one depending on them but themselves. Because they were one of many, not that One Girl, and thus had the freedom to fall, and pick themselves back up again, as Faith had. Because if they faltered, the world wouldn't end. Because they didn't have that inborn pressure. How many of them would dance with the dark and their demonsides? How many might go rogue, because she had given them the 411, loosed their chains; and there were so few Watchers now, and so many girls, many of them angry?   
  
/We'll have to come up with help. The kind of help we needed and never got. Not just Watchers who teach them about demons and who they need to fight, or even just make treaties with, but also, like... counselors, who get what this world is like, but know how to help with trauma and stuff. Maybe... group therapy. How can we make that happen without them all getting committed like I did, because the therapists'll think they're nuts?/ A sobering thought and a real one, one from which she wanted instinctively to flee, because to her it was anathema. She could never consider therapy for herself for that very reason. It was an inborn terror. To talk to an outsider meant sterile white rooms and beds with soft Velcro restraints and screaming to faceless bastards to 'please let me go home I'm not crazy Mom please Dad please I'm not crazy!' and drugs that made the world whirl until she couldn't tell where the floor was and what was real anymore and there was no way out.   
  
But the others might need it, if it could be trusted. Maybe there were... part-demon... human-passing therapists, or something. Who knew. Now, with this new ability to make alliances, anything was possible. Which meant maybe, someday, if it was trusted for long enough, with others... she might be able to trust it. Maybe. Someday. Just maybe. In small, easy-to-swallow snatches.   
  
Ish.  
  
/Anyway, we need to get bigger. Organize; really make this an organization, with supports, so they don't end up like me and Faith. I need to talk to all our leftover Watchers, our organizers. They're gonna need more than just leaders and a few witches. And the Watchers'll need help too; I mean, look at Xander and Wil. They're a mess just like me. Counselors... And we'll have to check in more often with the girls who don't wanna join the Organization, and make sure they're handling it okay, and maybe touch in with the families of the ones who are staying with their parents, so they don't lose it like Mom.../  
  
Family was important. Her eyes drifted to all that she had left of blood family. Dawn, splashing through the sea before them, laughing as she bent to inspect something in the sand beneath her feet. She was damn lucky to have anyone. /You never know when you could lose them, once you fall through the looking glass into the supernatural world, because someone died and you got tapped next, or some Power somewhere wanted you to have visions, or They decided you had the right stuff to be a Champion and sent an ex-Potential vamp to turn you.../ She felt her mouth tighten, and Spike's hand twitched in response to her emotions, his eyes glancing over her in concern. /...Or somebody touched an ancient axe-thing and woke up the beast in you./ For the first time, she found herself wondering why they had been permitted to do that, and what it all meant for the future. There was a lot of power in the world now, with hundreds of activated Slayers. They had yet to see how that imbalance screwed with things, when just her being back had brought the First out. /So many questions, between Chaos magick and the Powers and who the heck knows who else is playing dice with us. We'll just have to do our best with what we have till we find out, because we'll never know till we know. Give them family if they lost theirs, or help them keep the ones they have, and try to do right by them till we find out what it all means./ She absently stroked her fingers over Spike's to let him know she was alright.  
  
His hand twitched under fingertips, not quite believing her. Which was fair. There was so much to do. /And you're retired/ she reminded her dork of a brain. /You have to pace yourself. Do it over the phone. You promised Spike you'd step back./ She would do the new Slayers justice--her legacy--and also give herself to her family, and to herself. She would do enough to feel at peace with leaving, but not let herself get sucked back in.  
  
She covered his hand with hers on her thigh. She owed him that much, because he was the one who had helped her as she made the impossible, agonizing transition. /You were right about me, Spike./ He’d been right as Faith had been, no matter how much she’d hated to see it. No matter how much she’d feared to tip over the edge, as her sister-Slayer had done, and become lost. Worse than dead. And no matter how much it terrified her that those chill hands could bring her to a heaven that she had only otherwise glimpsed when she didn’t even have a body.

Would the siren-song of his words been so alluring, if she hadn’t half-believed it herself? If she hadn’t wondered it, sometimes, in the depths of her own mind, all those years alone in the cemeteries while her friends laughed and talked and danced in the light? 

She had gone too far into the dark, for a time, while Spike switched places with her in equal self-mortification. Had found, she thought too late, that she could stand on that line, and found it cold with nothing to lean against to keep her from falling; forward, wholly into the dark, or back into a place that no longer fit her.   
  
But now he was there with her again; had come back out of the burning, deadly light to meet her on the line they owned. Now she could stand there once more; where she belonged, with his fingers on the humming pulse of her, and give herself up. Rock into him. Lean hard against his equal strength and know that he had come to join her. To stand on that line beside her now, and murmur filthy, wondrous things to her in the liminal light between day and darkness. He had done that; for her.

And she was safe to be who she truly was. Indeterminate. Not light, not dark. 

And finally free.

The sun was descending at a rapid rate, painting the biscotti-colored sands a familiar reddish-orange. One of the rocky outcrops off to one side of the beach had gained a creeping tinge of the color, making the edges and projections of the stone take on almost the look of an Ano-Movic face, hollering in excitement. Off to one side, their nearest neighbor, a white, stucco structure, looked like it had been bathed in Clamato. It was gorgeous here. And… “One time, back when I first moved to Rome…” Buffy pulled in a hollow sort of breath. “I went to the beach, down in Ostia, you know, where it’s all pretty…”

He nodded understanding. Ostia was where all the really nice beaches were. “Anyway, I stayed there all afternoon, after the meeting I had there, and just watched the stars come out. I was so lonely, and I was missing everyone and everything. Just being there made me think of beaches, and California, and that made me think of you… which was weird, you know, because it wasn’t like you and I ever went to the beach. I mean, the closest we ever got was fighting for our lives together on some dock…” 

Spike nodded, watching her intently. The claim between them flowed with a calm sensation, and she hoped he would understand when she got to the part that made her feel almost… disloyal. “Anyway… I just stood there. Watched the sun go down, and missed you. Because that was when we’d always meet, you know? When the sun started to go down. That was when I could come to you.” She sighed a little, wistful in retrospect. “Once the stars came out I just watched them for a little. Kind of like I was counting them, coming to life on the water. It was like this big, velvety blanket out there; you know, how it’s all calm sometimes?” She lifted her hand from his to wave it before them, at the rippling Mediterranean, and he nodded again, silently prodding her on.

It gave her the strength to continue. “I was… happy for a second. I had this warm breeze in my face. Spring was coming, and it was like… maybe I could go on. For the first time in a long time I felt like… maybe someday I could be happy again. I hadn’t been able to see or feel anything beautiful for so long. I hadn’t felt… connected, to anything or anyone in forever, like losing you had completely set me adrift. But right then it was like… I _felt_ you or something.” Shrugging, she looked down into her glass and felt a little embarrassed. “I know, it sounds dumb now, but I just… felt better. And I really wished you were there. So…” She thought of reclaiming his hand, but she waited instead. “Maybe that’s why I really wanted to come back to the beach.” 

Something warm and rich slid through the claim, the quality of it amazing her. When he spoke, his words surprised her. “I went down to the beach in Ventura once, a bit after Andrew first came by. Probably along about the same time. Might even have been the same bloody day, for all I know. Hell. Maybe we were feeling each other, Buffy. Christ knows we’re soddin’ connected, even before the claim.” His confession caught her startled eye, and she jerked over to stare at him in surprise. He nodded, gave a little answering shrug. “Did the same bloody thing. Hung about in the shade of a patch of scrub pines and watched the sun set, then came out and laid on the beach after everyone left. Watched the stars like a great nancy, and thought of you. Wondered if you were happy. Hoped it. Flashed my lighter about at ‘em like I was writin’ you messages to the bleedin’ cosmos. Great wet dunce if there ever was one, but by mornin’ I felt… better than I’d felt about it in ages, so…”

She did reach for his hand then, wondering. God, what if… His night might have been her day, dragging her to her beach to think of him, or vice-versa; and what a thought. “I’d like to think so.”

He sounded uncomfortable. “That night… I felt at peace for once, even if I wished you were with me more than I wanted anything in life; ‘cause more’n that, I just wanted you to be happy. Safe and alright and content, yeah? So if you were… I was alright, too.”

/Oh, God./ 

His head turned toward her. “If you were happy, then I’m glad, Buffy. Even for a mo’.”

“I know. But.”

“Yeah.”

He needed to know. “It didn’t last.” Her shoulders twitched to show off her uncertainty. “I don’t know. That time was so… It was like the world was this roller-coaster, and I didn’t have a safety-bar. And by the time I found out about you… I knew everyone would say I should have just held on and tried to be sane, but I was ready to just throw my hands up and go with the ride, because that made a hell of a lot more sense. Because I needed you with me. Feeling you with me in that moment was the only time I felt… right.”

Understanding flowed between them. 

The sun was dipping low now, the edge of it lost behind the horizon to their right. Dawn’s edges were blurring into twilight as the time that was theirs came upon them. Spike’s hand wormed free from hers and he held out his flask, tapped her glass with it once more in a genial offer to ‘spike’ her juice with a little something extra. She lifted her eyebrow in faint accusation. “Why, you dastardly vampire; are you trying to take advantage of me?”

“No, but if you wanna take advantage of me, I’m all yours, pet.” He grinned again. “Isn’t that part of beach living?” He nodded out at the sinking star. “Sunbathing, alcohol, dehydration, swimming…”

“No to the sunbathing for you, Mr. Big Pile of Dust. You’re an investment.”

He shrugged it off, pushed himself to his feet and headed for the edge of the portico to lean against the pillar. “That barely counts as sun anymore.” He was clearly raring to get out of there and join in the fun.

She followed him, planted a kiss on his cool shoulder. “You know… you’re a really terrible vampire.”

That earned her a backwards, burning glare. “Oi. I’ll have you know that I was an excellent vampire for a hundred sodding years! Those sods who sent you to me weren’t the only ones who got named ‘the Scourge’! I earned that shite, right along with Angelus and Darla…”

From one Scourge to another. From one family to another. And here they were, with an entirely different family, and an entirely different reputation in this underground world she now inhabited by choice. “You really tried, didn’t you.” Smiling, she cupped his face. /You earned this one too. We earned it together./ “You’ll always be my vampire. All with the grr. And when you bite me it definitely makes me go weak in the knees.”

He huffed and rolled his eyes at her, half-pleased and half-offended still, at being managed. After a moment, though, he sobered, and she knew why. They both had to make sacrifices to stay here. She remembered him, all-too-recently holding back three human guys to save them from certain death so that he could leap into battle against fellow demons; a thing he’d been doing for years now, really. But he’d been doing it at first for her. Was he really doing it now for his own reasons, or… “You seem… happy enough, now,” she inquired hesitantly, “with your white hat, and your gray zones.” /Like ending up with a nice stash of bourbon for free, and a Buffy on tap. Is that… _enough_ for you? Am _I_ enough for you, or…/

His head jerked back around, and he eyed her quietly. “Are you, Buffy? How are you with your gray hat? Think the Scourge were right?” He nodded at the descending sun. “Do you belong in the darkness with me?”

/Oh, Big Bad…/ She scoffed at him. “You don’t even really belong there, Spike. You were never very good at staying in the dark, any more than I was at staying in the light.”

He looked nonplussed for a very brief moment… but then he clicked his tongue behind his teeth and nodded reluctant agreement, amused. “Yeah, well. Always was crap at following the rules.” 

Buffy tore her gaze away from him to look out at the ebbing tide. At the rest of their family; tiring near the end of her day, but still gamely awaiting them. It wasn’t quite their time yet, but it would be shortly. The sun was a mere sliver now, on the western horizon. “I think…” She caught his hand again. “Where I actually belong… is here, in the dusk, with you.” 

He bore down hard on her grip. Coolth and fire. The sun descended into the sea, seemingly quenched in the cool of the water; but it looked as if it were instead being set aflame. “Yeah. I can live with that.”

* * *  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


(Quote #1: Jerry Gillies  
Quote #2: Jean de La Fontaine)

**I very much hope you enjoyed this (pretty chill) interim fic linking "Ethnocentrism" and the future of this family, and bridging the madness of Hell-A and the upcoming madness.**  
  
**We will, for better or worse, be re-entering (my version of) the comics, "now with less insanity because so many of those nonsensical storylines have been derailed!" We shall see what happens with that ASAP, though posting slightly less often since that's still a story in progress. I've significant padding between where you are and where I am, but I'm going to have to make sure y'all don't catch up to me too quickly!**  
  
**The next story is titled "Souls Unbound". Look for it soonest.  
Thank you again!!!**


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